8 Ways To Optimize Your Blog For Search

This article relates to a previous post “How your blog will drive potential clients to your business”. Today we focus on ways to optimize your blog for search. It is the technique of making your content easier to find for search engines like Google and of course your prospective clients.

The term “search engine optimization” or SEO, describes the process of increasing both the quality and quantity of traffic to your website or blog. Well optimized web pages will appear on the first pages of the search engine listings. The ultimate goal is to bring people to your blog who are interested in the content you offer. Here are a few tips on making the most of SEO on your blog.

1.  Write Descriptive Post Titles

This is the single most important thing you can do to optimize your blog for search and drive more traffic. Imagine what you might type into Google to find your post and include it in the title of your blog post.

2.  Use Image Titles that Match Content in your Post

Title images with one or more words from your post title to increase the “relevance” of your post. This will help your blog index better against that term.

3.  Use SEO Keywords in your Content

Include the key terms from your image and title in the body of your post, especially early in a post. You will have a greater chance of coming up higher in the search engine rankings. To find keywords, use Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool.

4.  Post Regularly

The more often you update your blog, the more often your pages are indexed by the search engines, and the higher your ranking climbs. That is why blogs are inherently more search-engine friendly than a website. Most websites aren’t updated for weeks or months, whereas many bloggers post new content on a regular basis.

5.  Alert or “Ping” a variety of Websites every time you Publish a New Post

Luckily, TypePad as well as WordPress makes this easy for you.

6.  Link to Other Quality Related Content

There are many reasons to link to other sites or posts on the web, and optimizing your blog for search is one of them. When you link to quality sites or articles on the web that are relevant to the content of your post, you increase your chances of a higher ranking.

7.  Generate Inbound Links

An inbound link is a link from another blog or website that points to yours. If that blog or website is highly viewed, the link is “counted” more heavily and your search engine ranking rises as a result. Inbound links are not directly in your control; someone else has to link to you. That said, if you build goodwill within the blogging community and write consistently good content, chances are good that you’ll begin to generate inbound links.

8.  Submit your Blog to the Major Search Engines

You can further get your content out to the search engines by going to Google, Yahoo! or any of your favorite search engines and type in “submit blog.” You will be directed to a page that will allow you to submit your URL for indexing.

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For a free must-have SEO tool for Firefox, read “5-minute SEO with SEO Blogger for Firefox” by Chris Garret.