More and more people are now asking for blogs to be put on their websites, but why is this? Firstly blogs provide an aspect of interactivity for the customer/user visiting a website – if they can contribute towards the website itself (collaborative authorship), they are more likely to come back and re-visit the website in the future, ultimately decreasing bounce rate.
Blogs also play a large part in attracting the positive attention of the major search engines, improving page rankings and drawing in more traffic to your website. However some blogs get noticed more than others by the search engines, here are the top 5 ways to make your blog more search engine friendly!
It’s easy enough to hop on your blog and just start rambling about the happenings of the day or week. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s not really taking the fullest advantage of the potential that’s out there via the search engines. In order to best capture the focused attention of the search engines for any given post, you’ve got to construct the blog post with focus too. The best approach to doing so is to loosely construct each post with a certain keyword phrase in mind—and be sure to use natural variations and synonyms of that keyword throughout the blog post as well.
Many blogs don’t allow the user to make this accommodation, but it’s extremely important to help the search engines understand and properly list your blog posts by providing Meta information like a great Title Tag and Description Tag. In fact, it’s been speculated that the Title Tag alone is the single most important component of any post when it comes to the search engines—and unfortunately, by default, most blogging software just leaves it blank or fills it in automatically with some random information. Ask your provider about how you can submit a descriptive SEO-optimized Title Tag with each and every post you write (here at Sleepless, our programmers always include this feature on the blog’s back-end).
Again, most blog software will allow you to fill in a field that contains tags—a.k.a. your top keyword phrases for the post. By doing so, you’re effectively having your blog software create additional website pages based around each one of these keyword phrase tags that can be captured and listed by the search engines. Sure, they’re not given the same priority of treatment by the search engines than your actual blog post itself does, but they do help you attain an additional level of search exposure with absolutely minimum additional effort.
Image search accounts for a healthy and ever-increasing number of searches. By including a topically-related image with each one of your blog posts, you’ll be doing double duty when it comes to getting more attention from the search engines (and your potential visitors). Be sure to rename your image with a file name that uses a topically related keyword from your blog post—and also try your best to use your blog software to add a keyword-based Image Title Tag to the image as well. This will help the search engines match up your image and blog post with the topic it should be listed for.
Don’t blog to the point where quality suffers significantly, but do blog as often as your time and writing ability permits. Search engines love blogs that are constantly adding fresh, new, top-quality content. It helps them keep their visitors happy by providing lots of relevant and engaging information when they do their searches. Again, the exact schedule you should keep is really up to you—but you probably don’t want let it go more than every week or so for best results.