How To SEO Your Blog Posts For High(er) Rankings
Make Your Blog Posts Search Engine Friendly – My Best Tips to SEO Optimize Your Blog
To make your posts properly optimized for a better chance at higher search engine rankings and to be more SEO friendly, I can offer a number of suggestions. Surprisingly, many bloggers don’t pay any attention to SEO issues, so their blogs are basically lost in search-engine-land.
That’s a shame, as it’s really not hard to attain decent (or even top) organic search engine positions by following some basic SEO guidelines. But I must briefly mention that to keep any blog in the top SERPs (search engine results pages), you need to continue to add quality content on a regular basis, and you also need good quality incoming links.
My SEO Suggestions to Optimize Your Blog Posts
The Title: Here’s the first SEO step. Your main keyword phrase must be incorporated into your post’s title, and it should be at the beginning, rather than the end of the Title if at all possible.
Post Slug: The slug (one of the built-in tools in your blog) is found over in the right hand side column of the WordPress editor. By default, if left empty, the slug will automatically be filled with your entire title when you publish the post, but with the words all in lower case and each word separated by a dash. As example, this post’s slug is: how-to-seo-your-wordpress-blog-posts-for-high-rankings.
The slug is just like the page name of a traditional HTML coded website. But, you can manually type in whatever you wish the slug to be (it will not alter your Title). Many people, myself included, will alter the words in the slug to be shorter than their Title, or maybe a little more keyword focused than what their post’s Title happens to be. I don’t make a habit of doing this, but every now and then do alter it for one reason or another.
Blog Post: Following “traditionally taught” SEO techniques, you should use your keyword phrase in the very first sentence of your post.
Contrary to a lot of information floating around the internet, it is not necessary to use H1, H2, bold, or italic codes as examples, on your keyword phrase in order to gain higher rankings. But, for aesthetic reasons, you may wish to use one of these HTML codes to bring attention to the actual keyword phrase in your copy.
I suggest you sprinkle your keyword phrase throughout your copy. Use the keyword phrase a little bit more than you would in normal conversation. But don’t overdue it … you’ll look like you’re spamming. Also, incorporate your keyword into the very last paragraph.
Tags: Tags are a misunderstood, thusly often overlooked, part of optimizing your blog. Make sure to use the tags at all times. Include your main keyword phrase and then some keyword variations or modifiers. Tags are sort of like labels, but in this situation, they are keywords that pertain to the content of your post. Tags help make it easier for other people to find blog posts relating to a specific category, or subject for instance. So include keywords that you think would help your post be found if someone were searching for it 
Hyperlinks: If your posts contains hyperlinks to other posts (or pages) in your blog, to web pages on other sites, or to affiliate programs that are related to the topic, it is a good SEO tactic to include a keyword phrase to hyperlink to them. Of course make sure it is a keyword that pertains in some way to what your post is about.
Images: I like using images in my blog posts whenever I can, since a picture often speaks a thousand words. Make sure you include the “alt” tag in the image’s coding, and make sure you’ve placed the keyword phrase in there. This helps give you a small rankings boost.
For Serious WordPress Bloggers, I Suggest and Use this Great SEO Plugin
All in One SEO Pack: This free SEO plugin for WordPress is an absolute must-have for any blogger who is serious about SEO-ing their posts. You can provide information for a Title tag (yes, it can be completely different from the title that starts off your post); the Description meta tag and the Keyword meta tag. Whatever you enter will be shown in the SERPs. Download it and I promise you’ll love it.
NOTE: Since I use WordPress exclusively for my blogging needs, I’m not able to suggest plugins for other blogs built on the many other platforms available. Sorry …
A Free SEO How-To eBook for Anyone Who Has a Website or Blog
That’s right! Free information and guess what? I wrote this primer and if you’d really like to learn search engine optimization basics to help improve your website or blog’s chances at better rankings, then read it over. I’m told I did a great job providing clear easy-to-implement optimization techniques. So why not download a free copy of my “The SEO Edge: Get Ahead of Your Competition EVERY Time!” right now.
Best of luck in gaining higher rankings with your blog posts.
Keyword Strategy For Beginners: Understanding Keyword Competition Levels
How Search Engine Ranking Competition Affects Visitor Traffic
Just the other day I received an email from someone complimenting one of my websites and saying that she was adding a link to it on her site. She also shared how she wanted to make money from her site, but was struggling to understand how in the heck to “get found” online in order to get lots of visitor traffic.
I clicked over to check it out and oh dear … it was pretty much what I expected to see. Sadly, though I saw a website that was built around excellent efforts and perhaps a pretty good niche, I saw blunder after blunder in every aspect one could imagine IF INDEED one wishes to not only appear in the search engine results which brings the visitors, but more importantly wishes to make some serious money from that site.
So … why are some people smiling about their search engine rankings and the levels of traffic they receive, and others are bemoaning about trying to figure out how to get traffic? My best assumption is easy to make. If anyone is wondering how to “get visitors”, then right there I know that the individual is unaware of even the most basic of SEO and keyword strategy fundamentals.
I’ve got lots of great posts about keyword research and such in the Keyword category, so please check it out and read the posts to educate yourself. But today I want to touch upon a very important aspect that needs to be considered when doing your keyword research.
Keyword Strategy – Research the Competitiveness Level
Let’s define what competitiveness of a keyword phrase is. It means how many other websites on the internet are using that exact keyword phrase – such as “vegetarian recipes” – that you want to target in the content of your web page.
There are a number of ways to perform keyword phrase research, and this post isn’t attempting to tackle all of them, rather I want to easily show one way that beginners can use to help figure out what keywords they should target.
Remember now, I said this is but one of many ways to help determine keyword strategy. But it can give good insight to those of you starting out.
As a very general rule, when you type your search term into Google a page of results will be returned. You will see this (click image for full size):
**Note the areas I’ve circled at the top of this image. You see the SERP (search engine result pages) result for the keyword phrase.
On the following chart, let’s look at some numbers:
- If there are less than 100,000 SERPs returned for a keyword phrase that phrase can be considered low competition.
- If you find between 100,000 and 1,000,000 SERPs for a keyword phrase, that phrase is considered a medium level of competition.
- If you see SERPs over 1 million … I’d recommend you not try to go after that keyword phrase until you’ve got a good sized site that utilizes lots of medium to low competition phrases.
|
SERPs In Google |
Competition Level |
|
< 100,000 |
Low |
|
100,000 – 1,000,000 |
Medium |
|
1,000,000 > |
High |
However, if you’re entering into a highly competitive niche – such as “computer equipment”, a keyword phrase with 50,000 results can most likely be considered highly competitive. Much does hinge upon the niche and the other websites attention to SEO and other factors.
It is necessary to formulate keyword strategy on a site-by-site, niche-by-niche basis. Everyone wants their website to achieve top rankings for targeted traffic. One must come up with a well researched and thought-out list of keywords to target, whether you’re a beginner or expert. In the case of most online marketers who are just starting out, keyword strategy means they should start building content around slightly less competitive phrases, and then work their way up to including web page content on higher competition phrases.
Good traffic boils down to proper keyword research coupled with effective keyword strategy coupled with great content.
How Many Keywords Make An Effective Query?
Let’s Learn About Short-Tail and Long-Tail Search String Queries
The following question always arises when new online marketing website owners are learning to implement keyword strategy, “How many keywords are best (or allowed, or OK to use, etc.) for my keyword phrases?” Two, three … five, six? Well, the fact of the matter is, nothing about keyword phrase length is set in cement!
Two and Three Word Queries are Used Most Often by Searchers
What is “set in cement” is the need to know what keywords and keyword phrases your customer base would most likely be typing into (or querying) the search engines. That’s what matters! So, first you’ve got to compile a keyword list or have one researched for you by a knowledgeable SEO consultant, such as the thorough one I offer: Keyword Research Report.
Keyword phrases that your customers are using to find you can be rather eye-opening when you start looking at the statistical information offered by your web host’s web tracker or hit-counter service. If you don’t have a means to see exactly what keyword phrases your website’s visitors are using to arrive at your website, then I highly suggest you go to StatCounter.com and take advantage of their free service.
I recommend StatCounter to many of my small business clients. They find it is pretty easy to understand and is invaluable in not only helping them to do a better job at targeting the right keywords for use in their content, but also to learn where their visitors are originating from and how many visitors are landing on their site. StatCounter does provide good statistical information.
An Interesting Break-Down of Short and Long-Tail Keyword Use
According to data collected in January 2007 from users of European Web analytics provider OneStat, most people use 2- or 3-word queries in search engines. The RankStat research was based on a sample of 2 million visitors, made up of 20,000 visitors in 100 countries each day. Here’s what they discovered:
- Two-word phrases — 28.38 percent
- Three-word phrases — 27.15 percent
- Four-word phrases — 16.42 percent
- One-word phrase — 13.48 percent
- Five-word phrases — 8.03 percent
- Six-word phrases — 3.67 percent
- Seven-word phrases — 1.63 percent
- Eight-word phrases — 0.73 percent
- Nine-word phrases — 0.34 percent
- Ten-word phrases — 0.16 percent
I find these statistics on keyword phrase length interesting. And yes, depending upon what statistical company is reporting the findings, there will be slight differences in the percentages. But even now, in 2009, these numbers are not too different as provided in reports from various statistical companies that come into my inbox.
What these stats tell us is that searchers are learning to use multi-word combinations to help zero in on what they are searching for. They’re learning that the more precise they are in providing search terms, the greater the chance they’ll get to the information they are searching for faster. This also means the information will more than likely be exactly what they want.
Long-tail keyword phrases are normally quite easily incorporated into our Title tag, Description meta tag and web page content. The better we are at narrowing our keyword terms for each page of content, the greater chance we have to not only rank higher in the search engines, but to also attract targeted traffic to our website.
Targeted Keyword Phrases = A Greater Chance for Targeted Website Traffic
Just in case you are not sure what all this means, I’ll use this example. Based on the above statistics, we’d see keywords being used such as:
- Two-word phrase — cake recipes
- Three-word phrase — chocolate cake recipe
- Four-word phrase — chocolate bundt cake recipe
- One-word phrase — recipes
- Five-word phrase — easy chocolate bundt cake recipe
I am sure this example shows how much sense the 2 or more word phrases make to your search engine optimization efforts. The more specific you are in each page of information you create, the better off you will be in all marketing and SEO respects.
For more information on researching and utilizing keywords, refer to this very informative FREE 75-page case study: Keyword Research Guide from WordTracker.
Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords?
Boost Website Traffic with Targeted Keyword Optimization
Does your internet marketing website rank highly for keywords that almost no one searches for? It’s great to have top-ten keyword rankings, but if these phrases aren’t bringing a good stream of quality traffic to your website, then it’s obvious a “keyword overhaul” is in order.
Ethical SEO Techniques to Revamp Your Website Without Starting from Scratch
You say, “but I did research the keywords and the phrases I’m using throughout my website ARE the ones that proved to be most relevant to my website’s theme!” Yet, your visitor traffic is very poor. What can you to do in this case? You don’t want to rewrite your entire site’s copy. Take heart, there is a way to work through this not-so-uncommon situation.
Here’s a real example: I was hired to optimize a commercial website that had hundreds and hundreds of web pages of quality content, was receiving a few thousand visitors a day by virtue of other non-internet marketing methods, yet was severely lagging in qualified organic search engine visitor traffic.
Interestingly, the owner had tried to SEO the website himself, which I have no problem with. However, his lack of understanding of true search engine optimization techniques misled him to believe that merely “targeting” phrases pertaining to his marketing niche would do the trick. He thought that of course people would be typing those keywords into the search engines and voila, they’d find his website. Sorry, but no. And the lack of traffic via the various search engines bore this out to be true.
So, back to his big concern which was “Why am I NOT receiving a higher volume of visitor traffic to my (content rich) website?” Here is what I did as his SEO consultant and what you can do for your own site(s), too.
Researching the Keywords that People are REALLY Searching For
My first course of action was to turn to the keyword analysis tool Wordtracker to see if people were using the keywords my client had targeted. The news was, they weren’t! However, through research using this great tool, I did uncover many phrases that people WERE searching for that certainly pertained to his marketing niche and could easily be utilized using a few simple SEO techniques. I was able to uncover many good, high volume keyword phrases that could easily be implemented into his content, Title and Description and Keyword Meta tags. Yes, in many instances, there was a little tweaking necessary to many pages of content, but mind you, this was the most cost effective way to revamp his website. He had great content already, it just didn’t necessarily contain the proper targeted keywords.
In his situation, he had completely ignored the Title tag and Description meta tag. So, because these two tags are a major factor in helping to achieve high search engine rankings, I wrote compelling Titles and Descriptions using the newly researched keywords. I also gave him directions on how his editorial staff should tweak the content so that the new keywords would be sprinkled effectively throughout the copy.
After this “quick fix” was done (honestly, it took me a total of two months to compose and then optimize all his Title and Description meta tags because he had hundreds of web pages), we started to actually see search engine rankings for these newly targeted keywords. Yes, these rankings were rather low, but this is exactly how almost all SEO keyword campaigns begin. At this writing, the website is still coming up in the SERPs and guess what? A number of the keywords have already made it to top-ten rankings.
What Can You Learn from My Client’s Website Experience?
I attribute my SEO success with this small business website to the fact that I really dug into researching the keywords and the very necessary optimization of the Title and Description tags. The success also had (and still has) to do with the website owner’s willingness to be flexible.
He understood something would have to be changed to make the turn-around he was looking for. He accepted that much of his site’s content would have to be altered in accordance with the keyword phrases that people were REALLY searching for. He was willing to spend a little money, that being my services, to implement these changes.
The Bottom Line For Your Website …
If poor visitor traffic is plaguing your website, possibly the scenario I’ve just shared with you might be all that you need to do, too. Research keyword phrases and find out what people are really typing into the search engines. Make sure your content and all tags properly utilize these newly discovered keywords.
I do hope this information can help YOU improve your website traffic.
If you would like to have me perform Keyword Research for you, please Contact Me and I’ll be happy to discuss how we can work together to improve your website’s traffic.
