How to Optimize your Blog

If you want people to find your blog, you have to make sure the search engines find it.  And they not only have to find it, you have to make sure they think it’s important enough to rank in the first couple pages of search results.

Search engines use many metrics to rate and rank blogs, and they are constantly checking to make sure they have the latest information and versions.  For example, Google has “Googlebots,” or crawlers, that crawl through pages and read and follow links to and from them to determine the all-important PageRank.

To optimize how Google and other search engines see and share your site, here are some key tips on how to SEO a blog:

Title tags and meta descriptions

The title tag is what shows up in the top bar of the window when your blog is open, and more importantly, what your page is named in search. Make sure you name your blog something relevant to your content and ideal for search.

You can be sure your title tag is what you want by looking for this piece of code in your HTML: <title>YOUR TITLE GOES HERE</title>

Meta description is also important in that it’s what shows up underneath your title in search results, to describe what your blog is about.  Make this something that a) has smart search keywords, and b) is relevant to your blog content and entices people to read more.

You can set your meta description by looking for this piece of code: <META CONTENT=”YOUR META DESCRIPTION HERE”>

Keywords and content

If you want to SEO your blog, you should pick several keywords that you’d like to rank highly for and use them throughout your blog posts and individual titles.  It’s important to pepper these words repeatedly in your blog so search engines view you as an important resource for these topics.

The trick, though, is to not overdue it.  You don’t want to turn off your readers (once they’re there, you want them to come back!).  Optimizing a blog is different than optimizing a regular website for SEO – you want to create quality content that engages readers and makes them want to share… not just a page that makes them “get there” and that’s it.

Link love

Search engines love inbound links.  The more quality sites that link to your blog, the better you’ll rank in search.  The best inbound links to have are from higher-ranked sites than yours, from blogs and sites that are relevant to your content and that link to you using keywords that are relevant to your site.

So how do you get these sites to link to you? One of the simplest ways is to ask — although this can get a little spammy — so we recommend writing quality content (there we go again with the quality content…), and sharing these posts with other bloggers who might be interested in it.  If they like what they read, they’ll likely link to you. You can also submit your blog to directories (at the bottom of this post  you’ll fine a few lists of blog directories) or even buy links if it’s in your budget.

Link love goes both ways.  You should also link out to relevant blogs from your posts.  This will help search engines establish your blog as a trusted site and a good resource – and give you some extra SEO kudos.

Image names in search

Think about what you’re naming the images you have on your blog.  If you want to be highly searchable for “cute kittens,” then an image named cute-kittens-playing.jpg will be much better for SEO than, say IMG0054.jpg.  Google has no idea what’s in IMG0054, so it’ll never show up anywhere near the top for search.

It’s also important to use ALT attributes for your images.  This creates an additional place describe what your image is and also helps search engines index the content on your blog better.  This is the code you need to look for to do that: <img src=”imagename.jpg” alt=”ALT IMAGE DESCRIPTION HERE” />

Buy your domain name

As simple as this sounds, it’s important to note.  Your URL is one of the most important SEO factors, so having a blog URL of cutekittenvideos.com will rank much higher, and be easier for the crawlers to find, than cutekittenvideos.blogspot.com or cutekittenvideos.wordpress.com.  Buying a unique URL is a small investment that can have a big return.

Keep your content fresh

Lastly, and possibly most importantly: The more often you post, the more likely Googlebots and other crawlers will keep coming back to your blog to reindex it.  By constantly updating your blog and adding new content, you’ll essentially train the crawlers to come back more often.  If you only post once a month, you can expect that it will take longer for Google to stop by again and notice your new content.

Few blog directories:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/20-essential-blog-directories-to-submit-your-blog-to/5998/

http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/

http://www.aripaparo.com/archive/000632.html

For more information or questions please feel free to comment below or email us at info@bbexmarketing.com.