You should not care much about optimization and all if you are working on your personal blog and have no intention of getting search engine traffic or business off it. But what you will do if you are working on your blog with the intention of getting lots of search engine traffic and thus more business for you. If you are facing the similar kind of situation, I’m going to share my thoughts on how you can go about optimizing your blog posts to get maximum exposure, rankings and traffic from search engines.
1. Do Keyword Research
You should do some keyword research around the topic you will be writing your next blog post. I use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see the kind of terms people use to get information around a particular topic. You should have the set of keywords with you when you start drafting your next post. And once you have that, create high quality content around these keywords and try to be personal with your writing and don’t try to use too many keywords or too often in your blog post.
2. Do proofreading
Once you are finished off writing your blog post, its time to proofread it for spelling, grammatical, punctuation and other errors you would have missed while drafting it.
3. Main keyword in your post title
Now it’s time to start publishing your post on to your blog. You should aim at including your main keyword in your blog post title and if it makes sense, use it towards the beginning of your title.
4. SEO Optimized URL
Create a SEO optimized URL for your blog post where you will be including your main keywords and can ignore the stop words from your post URL. I would suggest using dashes (-) between words and avoid using underscores (_).
5. Add Image/Videos to your Post
Include images and videos in your post to make it more interesting, more informative and more search engine friendly. When you are including images in your blog posts, keep them of small sizes and don’t forget to include ALT text for all images. And don’t forget to include a credit note against images mentioning the original image source.
6. Link out to other websites
If you know of some other blog posts or articles related to the topic you are writing about, why don’t include them in your post. Inclusion of related stories from other websites and blogs will give additional information to your blog reader about the topic they are reading on your blog. When you link out to other websites and blogs, there is every chance they will link back to you sometime.
7. Content formatting
You should make sure that your post is well formatted. I would suggest using headings, sub-headings, bold, strong, italics, list items etc to make your content more informative and engaging.
8. Have Social Media Link/Icons in posts
Add links and icons pointing to all major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Yahoo Buzz etc in your blog posts. Presence of these links will motivate you and even your blog readers to share their favorite content on social networks where they are active.
9. Use Related Posts
I would highly recommend the presence of related posts at the end of each blog posts whatever blogging platform you are using. Related post section will serve lots of purpose like automatic content inter-linking, traffic generation for old posts, increased user engagement and thus will help towards improving your blog bounce rate.
10. Reply to comments
You should keep track of comments coming on your blog posts and reply back to all comments requiring some advice, tips or other information from your end.
Do you have something more to this list that one should take care of while optimizing its blog post from search engine prospective, please share in the comments section below.
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