Five Natural Ways to Optimise your Blog for Search Engines…
Optimising isn’t just for websites, and whether your blog is your business or simply used to promote your business, it pays to spend a little time honing it. Search engine optimisation (SEO) doesn’t have to be difficult or overly complicated, though. Often it just requires you to think about what the search engines are looking for and what users actually want, and then tweak your blogging practices accordingly.
Align your keywords and post topics
Keywords and phrases, though not as important as they once were, remain an essential way for the search engines to judge the relevance of a blog to their users’ queries. Rather than trying to ‘trick’ the search engines (which never works – those ‘bots are pretty darn smart, believe us…), pick keywords that your prospective visitors are likely to be looking for, and incorporate them into the natural flow of your posts only when appropriate. Often the topic of your post will give you a good idea as to what your keywords should be, and a little research can help you to further narrow down your choices.
Post regularly
The search engines are looking for content which is fresh and up to date, so that they can bring the most timely and relevant content to their users. Posting regularly (1-3 times a week) is a good habit to get into and will earn you extra SEO brownie points, as well as help you to build an online following.
Make social sharing buttons prominent
Social signals are gaining gravity within the search engine algorithms, and are likely to continue to do so. Help people to ‘like’ and share your posts by including social sharing buttons prominently within them.
Use keywords in headlines and tags
A blog post that contains the user’s query words within its headline and tags is generally judged to be more relevant by Google and other search engines. Furthermore, including relevant words in these places will help visitors to navigate your blog archives to find what they’re looking for.
Create quality content that is useful/ interesting
More than anything else these days, the search engines are looking for high quality content that provides value to their users. By creating such content, you’re sure to please the actual human beings who read it too.
