Blog SEO – How to Optimize Your Blog for the Search Engines

Creating and customizing your blog does not guarantee you will get web traffic. You need to optimize your blog for the search engines to maximize the potential it has to make sales, boost AdSense earnings or gain subscribers to your newsletter.

Methods to Optimize Your Blog.
I use Word Press as my blogging software so not all these methods may not apply if you use other software.

1. Keyword Research.

Before you start writing you should choose keywords that people are actively searching on. You can do this by inserting words into the keyword selector tool

If the words that you enter don’t display any results this means that no one uses those words when searching for that topic
and therefore it would be useless to have them on your blog. A high number of searches indicates that word or phrase is very popular.

2. Insert researched keywords.

Integrate your keywords into the title, h1, h2 tags, blog content, categories, links, alt tags (to describe your images) or anywhere on the page you set fit to add them. You want to get a good keyword density for each page so they will rank well in the search engines.

Every time you write a post, include targeted keywords in the title and content of your post.

3. Emphasize your keywords.

Use bold tags, or strong tags, etc. within your copy. This helps search engines identify which words or phrases should be given more weight.

4. Customize your title tags

The default title tags that come with your Word Press Template place the name of your blog first followed by the tag line.
So if your blog is called Bob’s Blog – Web Site Design Tips to Maximize the Profitability of Your Web Site, Bob’s Blog will be first.

Here’s the default code:


<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>


It’s always better to place your tag line first if it contains your targeted keywords..no body is searching for the words Bob’s Blog.

Here’s the optimized code:


<title>
<?php wp_title(' '); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo '--'; } ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>


This lets you reverse page title and blog name in the title tag.
Here’s a resource to learn more about Word Press Title Tags
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp

5. Add head-meta-description plug-in.

Your default template does not contain the description meta tags. These words show up in the search engine results to describe
what your site is about.

Here’s the head meta description plug-in

This plug-in will Insert the HTML META description tag, an excerpt for each post/page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Continue reading – How to Customize Your Permalinks