How to Optimize Your Blog For the Search Engines

One of the primary reasons to operate and maintain a blog about your industry is to gain high search engine rankings to assist you in driving targeted potential customers and clients.

Because blogs are updated on a daily or weekly basis they naturally have an advantage over static Websites or Websites that rarely has content changes or additional content.  Blogs also naturally receive better rankings because blog posts typically include lot of targeted keywords that helps Google rank your blog for specific targeted keyword phrases.

Even though a blog will naturally gain better rankings, there are still optimization techniques that will assist in gaining high Google and other major search engine rankings.  The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger.   Both blogging sites give you the flexibility to optimize your blog for high search engine ranking.

From an optimization standpoint, blogs are not very different from Websites.  Keyword driven content and incoming relevant links are still keys to your SEO success.  The competitive advantage of a blog is from the frequency of keyword driven postings.  By posting daily or multiple times per week, Google and other search engines will quickly take notice and index and rank your blog.

Some Blog Optimization Tips:

• Write an interesting title that correctly describes your blog post.  Your title should captivate the user to read more and possibly attract other Website operators to link to your blog post.
• Try to use the most important blog keywords in the title – while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant and assists Search Engines in ranking your Website for those targeted terms.
• Utilize the H1 tags – Your blog editor should allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags.  H1 tags is a specific style that search engines recognize as a title to the page and the importance of the keywords within this title
• Turn on the feature that allows you to control the name of the sub directory that the post exists within.  Use your most important 2 or 3 word keyword phrase, placing a dash between each word. (professional-financial-services)
• Make sure the name of the webpage matches your blog post title; this is referred to as URL Rewritten Permalinks.  In addition, most blogging platforms will allow you to add an SEO widget that will assist in the optimization of your blog pages.
• Don’t forget about your archives.   They are full of great keyword driven content that will be picked up by search engines.  Make sure these are always turned on and linked from your homepage.
• Link your blog from your corporate Website and any sister sites.  Also invite other relevant Websites to trade links with your blog to increase your incoming links.

Again, the key to a successful search engine optimized blog is frequent keyword driven postings.  It may not be necessary to write up a full article every time you post, two paragraphs and maybe some resource links is all you typically need.  One trick is to split a larger blog post into two sections (part 1 & part 2).  Posts the first part one day, and then post the second part the next day.  This will increase the frequency of your blog posts without a lot of additional work.

– Jason