Many people don’t think about SEO in the beginning and believe that it is something that can be saved for a leter time. However this isn’t true because when done properly, SEO would be incorporated into your blog setup and it is much better to think of it from the outset rather than trying to correct mistakes later.
Why Bother With SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is a great way to get traffic because it’s completely free and once the traffic begins to flow it can continue to pour in for months or even years. However it can take a while to get to this stage which is a good reason to bear it in mind from the start.
The cornerstone of SEO is content - you need text on your site that will rank in the search engines. Blogs are pure content so they make excellent targets for SEO. However it is also very easy to write a blog post that is not optimised for everything in which case you could be leaving a lot of potential traffic on the table.
Making Sure Your Posts Are Optimised
The first step in optimising your posts is knowing what keyword phrase you want to target. It is possible to target more than one but much more difficult. Now one thing that I would emphasise here is that as a blogger, particularly if you are starting out, if you have no idea about what keywords you want to target then just don’t worry about it as its best to concentrate on writing good content than thinking about search engines.
But if you’re writing a blog about digital camera’s for example and writing a post about a particular model then it makes sense to optimise that post to the model of the camera as that is something that would be searched on in Google. There are several places where you need to insert your keyword:
1) The title - as near to the beginning as you can. This is the most important keyword placement.
2) The post content - your keyword should sppear a few times throughout the body of your post but don’t go over the top with it.
3) Tags - Most blogging software such as WordPress allow you to add tags to your posts. Make sure your keyword is one of them.
4) The URL - make sure your post links have the keywords in them and not something cryptic. Software such as WordPress allows you to convert your post title into a permalink.
What About Existing Blog Posts?
If you already have some earlier posts that you wrote before you learned about SEO there are still some changes you can make retrospectively. One thing that is very important is to ensure that you do not change your URL as this will cause broken links to appear in search engines.
However you can change the text within your posts. You can tweak the titles, the text within the post itself and you can add and modify the post tags. Probably the most important change would be to alter your titles to make sure your keywords are as early as possible. For example, which one of these two is better if you want to rank for “make money online”? :
- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today! - Make Money Blogging - 10 Killer Ideas!
The second title would be preferable because the keyword is the very first part of the title. You will also want to make sure your keyword appears liberally sprinkled throughout the body text.
These kinds of changes can take a while to take effect though as Google may not visit your blog very often, especially if it is new.