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SEO for Blogs

You can improve a blog's search ranking by using these five simple SEO strategies.

Strategy #1 - Keyword-rich content

Identify a few keywords for your article that the search engine will rank highly. These keywords should be the most common words used in your article and should appear in the post and page titles, the page's URL, outbound links, bold tags, heading tags, image alt tags and meta tags, as well as throughout the text of your post and - this is key - in the first few sentences. Keywords should make up 5% to 20% of your post, though you should never sacrifice content for SEO.

Also see Getting your Keywords Right

Strategy #2 - Interlink the blog

A search engine will index the blog by sending a tracker, called a spider, to your site to track what you've written and to follow the links. A well-organized, internally linked and search-optimized blog can help the spiders maneuver through your posts. A site map can help make this process even easier. Categorizing articles and making sure that every page links to the main page are also simple but necessary steps to take. If you're writing about a topic you've written about before, consider linking to your earlier posts or using an 'other relevant posts' feature at the base of your article.

Strategy #3 - Register your domain name for the long term

Most spam sites are registered for a short time. A long registration period tells a search engine that you plan to stay around for a while. A recent Google patent indicated that the length of a domain's registration affected its page ranking.

Strategy #4 - Update regularly

The more often you update your blog the more often search engines will send their spiders to your site to index it. Your new articles could appear in these indexes within days, or even hours. This is a natural benefit of blogging and yields an almost immediate SEO benefit.

Strategy #5 - Quantities of content

The amount of information in your post is important. A decent-sized post will contain at least 250 words. While it's impossible to always write long posts, it's important that the post be content-heavy in order to rank high. On the other hand, a lengthy post will make it more difficult to keep your keyword density up to an optimal level, and could result in a page that is less tightly focused.

An SEO firm with the knowledge and experience to optimize blogs can help increase a page's ranking substantially by using enabled RSS feeds, themed website development, link swapping and other effective strategies.

Also see Practices to be Avoided