4 Quick Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

Blog posts should be optimized just like any other content on your website and that includes making sure that your blog posts are search engine friendly. Blog posts are invaluable in terms of long tail SEO, and it’s important to make sure that they are effective not just for your human readers but also search engine crawlers. As we’ve said before, search engine optimization is a constant process, but there are a few quick fixes you can make to help you blog posts rank better.

1. Use your keywords in your title. Often, when reading webpages, search engines give higher precedence to words that appear early on in the pages structure. By including your keywords in your page title you can help search engines understand which words are the most relevant and important on your page. Having your keywords in you title also helps when other websites are linking back to your post because many backlinks are created using the linked-to post’s title as the anchor text.
2. Use internal links. While external links are better for SEO than internal ones, search engines still pay attention to incoming links from your own website. This also makes your posts easier to read and encourages readers to explore your site further by offering them other relevant posts and webpages. 
3. Promote each post. If you want your posts to get seen by a larger audience (and consequently shared and linked to) you need to make sure they get access to it and one of the best ways to do this is to make sure you’re promoting each and every one of your posts. A quick and easy way to do this is to use social marketing platforms like Hootsuite (that’s what we use) which allows you to have your RSS feed automatically published to your social accounts every time you create a new post. 
4. Use your analytics. Website analytics are important for your blog as well as the rest of your website. Your website’s analytics will help you discover which terms your readers are using to arrive at your blog, what types of posts are the most popular and which search terms are the most relevant to your audience. That information is one of the best places to start optimizing your website for SEO. 

Posted by Amberlie Denny at February 8, 2011 8:00 AM

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