Are you a blogger?  Do you want to reach more visitors and rank better?  Search engine optimization is crucial for anyone that wants to blog. When you optimize your web pages — including your blog posts — you’re making your website more visible to people who are looking for keywords associated with your brand, product, or service on the web.

It’s hard to make yourself stand out, and it’s even harder to optimize your site and get Google and other search engines to notice and take you seriously!
What is the best way to get the search engines to rank you? How do you get people coming to your blog and interacting? How much social media and blogging should I do? There are a lot of unanswered questions! SEO tactics are confusing and some of them are best practices and some of them are outdated. How do you know?
We’ve noted some SEO tactics here…not all, but some. Do you have to do them all? No! But incorporating as many SEO tactics as possible will help your blog rank and get people noticing you. So here goes…

Blogger SEO 101

Focus on long-tail keywords.

…and not too many! One are two suffices because you don’t want to overdo it. You don’t want to add a gazillion keywords and mix up either Google or your customers…focus on one or two per blog post. You also don’t want Google to think you’re spamming the keywords!

A good rule of thumb is to focus on one or two keywords per blog post. This will keep you and your customers focused on a couple of key points, and not be all over the roadmap. What is a long-tail keyword and why use them? A long-tail keyword specifies exactly what you’re looking for, i.e. air conditioning repair in The Woodlands. This focuses on the exact people you need to come to your site and weeds out the extraneous people.

Incorporate the keywords into your blog post

Now that you’ve chosen your long tail keywords, where to do you put them? Here’s where!

     Blog Post Title

The title is the first and best place to include your keyword. Make it catchy and make sure it’s close to or at the beginning of the title. After about 60-65 characters, Google cuts off the title, so make sure it’s at least within those characters, preferably at the beginning. This post is about being a blogger, so my title may be…

Blogger SEO is Crucial for Ranking & Visitors!!

     Blog Post Headings and Content

Include your long-tail keywords in your blog post, but only in a natural, reader-friendly way. You want your blog post to be friendly and easy to read, not packed with keywords. You’re trying to inform or interact with your audience. We all know good writing…be sure it’s well written and impacts your reader…the keywords should be added naturally.

     Blog Post URL

Make sure your URL includes your long tail keyword. This can easily be changed in WordPress so make use of it!  If you would like more info regarding URLs, check out Moz’s Best Practices regarding URLs.

Blogger SEO is Crucial for Ranking & Visitors!
www.jax-works.com/blogger-seo-is-key-for-web-visitors

     Meta Description

A meta description is the description under the title when you perform a search. It gives the search engines a key to what the content is about and whether it’s relevant, and it gives readers an idea about what they will be reading.

Blogger SEO is Crucial for Ranking & Visitors!
www.jax-works.com/blogger-seo-is-key-for-web-visitors
Blogger SEO is crucial for web visitors and ranking.  Optimize your blog so it attracts visitors and makes search engines notice you. Read our tips!

Make a mobile-friendly blog

blogger seoGoogle realizes that more people search from their phone than their desktop. Google shows the mobile friendly version first…that means Google really likes mobile versions. What does that mean? Mobile should be important to you, too. Make sure your blog is optimized for mobile so your clients can see you at your best and search your website or blog easily.

Responsive design is extremely important, as is a mobile-friendly blog. A responsive design resizes the site, depending on the device. This is crucial for your users, as well as for SEO. People use many different devices to view a website or blog and if you prioritize your visitors’ mobile experience, you increase your rankings AND your customers.

Optimize all images

Images make your blog post stand out and make people notice your post on social media. They also make the post more interesting and user-friendly! Search engines also like images, not because they can see them, but because they look for a little tag called an “alt” tag. This helps the images be found in the search results by the keyword you place in the alt tag. Readers will like “cute bunny sticking out his tongue” better than IMG2015.jpg. So will Google!

cute bunny sticking out his tongue - blogger seo 101

Don’t use too many Categories or Tags

Some people use several categories or tags on their post. This is confusing and isn’t needed. Like keywords, limit your categories or tags to the most relevant ones.

Use internal links

Of course we all know inbound links show search engines relevancy of your content. Inbound links also show search engines the same thing, so if you have a topic that you’ve written about before that is mentioned in your post, be sure and link to it. That topic could be another of your web pages, a blog post, and ebook, or a video. This helps with SEO and helps share other interesting and relevant content with your readers. to your content help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content.

There are many more ways in which to optimize your blog, however, they are advanced and may not be needed when you first start out blogging. JaxWorks will add more to the topic of the optimization of blogs later on down the line. In the meantime, you can check out SEO Demystified for more info about SEO.  Also in the meantime, implement as many of these tips as possible so your blog shoots up in the rankings and attracts many more visitors. Good luck. If you’ve enjoyed this blog post and think it will help another blogger, by all means share it with them!