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.