Today we’re talking about blog lovin’ and we have some tips for optimizing your blog posts. When managing a blog- personal or branded- it’s important to have a goal. While blogging for fun is great, if you don’t set goals, you will never meet them. In the case with company blogs, you can have many goals: brand awareness, thought leadership, creating a conversation with clients and more. Whichever path you choose, there are some steps to consider so your blog is easy to find on search engines and RSS search engines for potential clients and readers.
1. Write what you want to read
Finding a compelling topic to write about is the first and sometimes most difficult step of blogging. A good tip for those with writer’s block is to think “What would I want to read?” If it’s not something you find interesting, chances are others will agree with you. What are you favorite bloggers writing about? Sometimes it’s hard to find inspiration, but once you find a topic that you can put your unique “spin” on, you’re on the track to blogging success.
2. Keyword Research
So you have a topic, now what? You need keywords. And not just any keywords. In order for most people to find your blog, they will no doubt have Googled something. Whether they’re in need of PPC expertise (Trada? What’s that?) or a recipe for roasted chicken (I swear this one is my favorite), there are a phrases and keywords they will use. If you’re not sure what keywords to incorporate, you need to do your homework. Google offers two tools- Google Keyword Tool in AdWords and Google’s Insights for Search. Both are extremely useful and will help you find the most common keywords people use to search the subject you are writing about, because the difference between roast chicken versus roasted chicken, or singular versus plural will affect your search volume. And remember, it’s important to have a mix of high search volume with low to medium competition, so your posts will get the best traffic.
3. Using Your Keywords
Since you went to all that trouble of finding keywords, you better be using them! By using the same keywords and keyphrases in the post title and title tags, people will be able to find your post easier in search. Visibility is a huge hurdle for many blogs to overcome, but you can give your blog a better chance of gaining traction.
Other uses for keywords:
- Repeated in blog post
- In metatags
- Placing keywords in links
- Alt text for your images
4. Just Imagine…
If you include images in your posts, it’s important to optimize those as well! As an offender myself, I know how easy it is to forget to make sure your keywords are in your image title, or to sync your image title with your blog headline.
There are many other ways to optimize your images:
- Changing the file name
- Linking to valuable informaton related to your image and post
- Adding captions and text
- Making sure your file size is web friendly (Try Smush.it to decrease the file size without changing the quality!)
- Also making sure you scale your images as small as possible but so they work within your site’s height/width
So evaluate your goal with the image, and optimize appropriately!
5. Link Love
Links can be hugely beneficial to demonstrate knowledge, promote others, and promote past posts. Linking to other publications gives your post credibility and can increase visibility as well! Linking to past blog posts gives your readers more relevant content to peruse and keeps them on your site longer- Win/Win!
Another mantra some bloggers follow is “what goes around comes around” in terms of links. If you give props to your peer by linking to a helpful article or post of theirs, then hopefully they will do the same for you one day! So give yourself some good blog karma, add links!
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Alamodestuff.
Want to learn more? Check out Part 2 of the series!
