Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
“What are the first steps to optimizing my blog for searches?” – question submitted by @monedays using the #pbquestions hashtag on Twitter.
Much has been written on the topic of search engine optimization for bloggers – but let me give you a few basic first steps:
1. Content is King
The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimization on a Blog. I suspect others will argue differently but as I look at my own blogs success in the search engines I’d say that this has been the number one factor.
Quality content that helps people will quite often draw a reader to want to share what they’ve written – of course they do this by passing on the link to your post and often they’ll do it in a way that helps your search rankings (on their own blog for example).
2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For
Every time you write a post you should be automatically be considering what words people might be putting into search engines to find that type of information. Once you know what kinds of words they’re using you’re in a great position to position yourself for that search.
3. Titles Titles Titles
There are a number of things to keep in mind when it comes to titles. Google pays particular attention to titles – so make sure you get them right:
- first make sure that the way you set your blog up puts the title of your post in the ‘title tags’ on the back end of your blog. This is really important.
- if you’re just looking from an SEO perspective don’t include your blog name in the title tags of single posts. This dilutes your keywords. Of course if you’re looking more at branding including your blog’s name in the title tags might be worth doing.
- next – include the keywords that you identified in point #2 in your post title
- also, keep in mind that the words you use at the start of a title tend to carry more weight than words you use later in your title
4. Keywords in other parts of your post
Use the keywords you identified in point #2 within your post also. If you want Google to rank you for a term or phrase you need to use that term or phrase. Use it in sub headings in your post (use h tags where you can), use it in the content itself, use the words in the alt tags of images etc. Don’t go over the topic but do use the words where you can naturally in the post.
5. Link to Your Own Posts
Don’t over do this one but while links from other sites are a great way to increase your blog’s rankings so are links from your blog. Interlink your posts to share where readers can find more information on your topic (where relevant) but also consider linking to key posts on your blog from other places on the blog (sidebar, front page etc).
6. Links from Outside Your Blog
Links from other sites to yours are key in SEO but they can be hard to get. Start to linking to your blog from other sites that you have or are active on. Some (like on Twitter) won’t count for anything much as they have no-follow tags but they are all potential ways for people to access your site and some will help with SEO.
Don’t become obsessed with getting links – rather become obsessed about writing great content and the links will generally come in time. However if you’ve written a great post that you think will be relevant to another blog don’t be afraid to let that blogger or website owner know about it – they could just link up.
Also – take note of the type of posts that you write that do well at getting other sites to link to you. You can learn a lot about generating linkable content by doing so and might just develop a technique that will work again and again.
7. Plugins
I don’t tend to do much to the back end of my blog to alter things like meta tags – but there are some good plugins around if you’re using WordPress that can help with some of this and that may give you a small edge. Check out 9 SEO plugins that every WordPress Blog Should have for some suggestions on this.
8. Readers Beget Readers
This isn’t an SEO technique as such but it plays a part. The more readers you have the more likely your blog is to be found by other readers. There’s a certain ‘snowballing’ thing that happens on a site over time – as you get readers quite often momentum grows as those readers pass on your site to others in their network. They link to you, they bookmark you, they tweet about you, they email friends about you, they blog about you, they suggest your site in recommendation engines….
Not all of this counts with SEO but some does and the accumulation of it over time all certainly helps to grow both organic and search traffic. I guess what I’m saying is to get readers any way you can – don’t just focus upon ‘SEO’ as such. It all counts.
My Hunch with SEO
Before I share my hunch…. let me say that I’m not an SEO and this could be completely wrong…. but it’s a hunch that I’ve had for a while now.
I’ve been doing this blogging thing for almost 7 years now and from what I can see the tweaks that many bloggers do on their blogs to optimize it seem to be having less and less impact on the rankings of blogs. Don’t get me wrong – I stand by the above tips completely and would do them as a common sense bare minimum – but from where I sit Google seem to be in the business of finding the best information that they can for their users. They don’t always get it right but I think they do a pretty good job.
As a blogger your job should be to provide the best information that you can.
It strikes me that Google have an ever increasing way of working out if your information is good. It’s not just about what keywords you have or how many links that you get – but these days they own Feedburner (know how many people subscribe to your blog and what links people are clicking on), they own Google Reader (again giving them all kinds of great data), they own Gmail, Google Analytics, YouTube etc…..
Now they may or may not use all the data in their ranking of sites but they certainly could know a lot about your blog and the posts you write. There’s also been increasing talk over the last 6 months or so about how easy it’d be for search engines to start generating data on what content is being shared in social networks and bookmarking sites.
My hunch is that many traditional SEO methods are less important (NOT irrelevant though) and that other factors are increasingly going to come into play. I’m sure that some will work out ways to manipulate this (SEO 2.0?) but increasingly the way to get ranked high in Google will be that you just need to keep producing great content and making sure that it’s sneezed out to your network.
Help this process along by giving your readers way to share your content (and seed it to social networks) as well as to become subscribers.
This article was first published July 2, 2009 and updated September 1, 2022.
Yes, I agree the content is king. That’s why I’m focusing writing quality articles and submitting it to top major article directories to get quality backlinks, good for seo.
What if these 8 steps doesn’t work? I mean Google has been changing policies its very difficult to judge how your blog could be..what say?
I don’t mean this in a negative way, but it shocks me that this isn’t simply common knowledge by now. I suppose though, for anybody new to blogging, maybe even new to the internet, that this information would be new.
and then of course it shocks me by how lazy most marketers are as well. I’m trying to get my wife to start blogging, with an eventual goal of both occupying her time and earning extra cash. The challenge however is she “just wants to write about stuff she is interested in”. This of course doesn’t have much chance of creating long-term value or a steady list of readers.
So I end up blogging until 4am on issues that I don’t care a thing about but that will draw readers.
@dubai property portal…hmmm, something tells me you already know these tips work and just needed to post something :) But just in case, these things do work, just don’t expect hundreds of visitors to one blog posting, instead be consistent in your blog postings and if you have hundreds of postings, and average pageviews per visitor of between 3 to 5, you will begin to see a consistent and steady stream of traffic. Usually you won’t hit this plateau until you’ve got somewhere between 20 and 50 posts though, depending on what you write about.
thanks for the info,
usually most of my pages show up on the top 10 results of google, here are the factors i take into consideration : 1) title 2) path of the page 3) keywords within page 4) header tags 5) bold or italics 6) internal links
external links are still important but i do well without them
Aside from these great tips that Darren gives us here, I’d like to add something important that you can keep in mind as well :
When doing SEO for a blog, think of your blog posts as single pages that are optimized for certain keywords (3 is nice). They are stand alone HTML pages.
Now, if you choose your the single pages (blog posts) topics so that they are related to each other, you will not only have more sticky readership but it will help your SEO as well.
Keyword relation is still highly underestimated.
So : if you have a blog about fruits, your posts are about banana’s, apples, oranges etc… throwing in a few posts about car repairs may lower your rankings for the fruit topics as well…
Apply Darren’s tips around this concept and you will improve your chances for higher search engine rankings…
Seo is very important I am a fan of seo articles this post contains great tips,Thanks for sharing. I think article submission is one of the methods that helps me.
i will be curious when google comes out with this program. i will try it.
Thank You,
David Lee
DavidALee’s.Com
Great article. In order to increase website traffic even more, I suggest to my clients that they recycle old blog posts into online articles and post them on online article directories. Results of posting online articles varies, but I find that every little bit helps.
Wouldn’t you love a search engine were you don’t need to think about SEO?
I’d prefer a world where there were only 10 sites and mine were 9 of them.
Darren – A question from someone who has been a long-term subscriber, is it hard to come up with new content for ProBlogger?
It seems like I read this same post right when I started blogging back in January of 2008.
By the way Darren, I appreciate your tips. I’m now making up to $400.00 per month because of some of them.
Thank you.
Taylor Thompson
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing that with all of us. I actually have three active blogs. I will give you one in case you are interested in taking a look. You can find the other two from there. http://www.americanrestart.com/
There is one other thing I would like to give you information on. It is an unbelievable blog traffic tool. I use it and would not be without it. It’s a two minute review at: http://hotshorturl.com/wt67
Again, thanks for your posts and keep blogging!
Wayne
I’m curious about the suggestion to recycle blog posts into online articles. Are we talking about duplicate copy in multiple locations?
I’ve heard that duplicate copy can hurt your stats with Google, so if I write about the same topic in a couple of different places…I always make sure the posts/articles are slanted and written differently in order to avoid generating dupe copy.
What’s the deal with duplicate copy and its possible effect on your stats?
This sounds very true about minor tweaks becoming less relevant than providing great information. Off-site SEO is important, too – including factors such as domain age. Good luck to you guys!
Just want to thank you for such a great post. I must say that it is the content that affects your blog’s popularity most, than any other aspect. It brings organic growth.
I am glad to see that you hold the opinion that writing quality posts is the most important factor in blogging. However, as I have been finding out that alone is not enough- so I appreciate your other tips. Most of them are easy to follow for someone new to blogging and not technologically savvy with the computer. I will definitely be working on implementing or improving upon each of your tips in my blog.
Hi
All the points are discussed very briefly.The content is really king for seo.The right selection of the content plays the important role for seo.The another thing that the keyword density use the key words of the right density.
Great post. These are the first few steps every blogger must follow.
Those are real nice tips Darren. Bloggers, I guess, will still need to do a lot of work on optimizing the content they already have.
Do you have any idea for people that using blogspot platform, all software and plug in that you talk about is just for WP user, how about for blogger.com user ?
Nice post. My blog is still new one. So, it is very useful for me (especially) and all of bloggers.
There is a lot that goes into SEO, but you’ve hit the nail on the head in terms of getting your titles right, targeting keywords that people search for, and using the keywords in the post. Having a good internal link structure, and lots of quality inbound links helps too!
SEO is one of the most overlooked aspects of blogging today.
Many bloggers need to realize that its not enough to just build a blog, but in order to gain an effective traffic base you must optimize.
Great post Darren!
Great tips!
Also, consider writing multiple posts using the same SEO-targeted keywords. You’ll often get double entries in the search results, and these tend to draw the eyes of searchers and result in more clicks.
its surprising that the most important tip “Content Is King” is also the most ignored.Just look at most sites on the web and you will see poorly written,untargeted content.
Interesting post! I have always found it useful to outsource SEO work via elance or some other “hire an expert” service to gain an added advantage. This has always been a good experience for me since I am not always willing to go 100% into SEO. This leaves room in my day for more things. I get a lot more accomplished this way.
While I’m here, I’d thought I’d plug a product from a friend of mine. Check it how to earn your living online using pretty simple stuff:
http://www.iwantmycd.com
Great list. I happen to agree with your hunch. I think Google values quality information over seo techniques. I do think interlinking is real important as well. Anything to keep traffic around longer can not be bad :-)
Thanks for the great tips. I’ll try and use some of them on my website. Your article was very educational.
Great tips as always Darren I learn so much every time I visit your website.
Thankyou
Nickyxx
Hi Darren , I really like this post, as many of us like to achieve the higher level from now by mean of blogging. Its really not so easy to teach people how to make money. I always follow your suggestions and implement that in my blog. Its really helpful to me.
yes absolutely content is the king that word impress me,I want to create my own blug,your tips are impressed me so i want to read more and updated one, Thankx to U.
Great tips! yup i agree 100% that writing or focusing on the content is the way to get higher ranking in google. content is king!
Nice Article. Search engine optimization goes a long way in generating traffic. An effective method would be to submit to article directories which give good inlinks to your website.
Search Engine Traffic is the enrich diet for blog or any website.
Search Engine Optimization can drive this diet for a blog or any website.But it depends upon SEO Expert.It need some tricks also like keywords tracking,keywords ideas,title ideas etc.
Thanks for this tutorial.
You say “make sure that the way you set your blog up puts the title of your post in the ‘title tags’ on the back end of your blog.”
How can I do this – is it under “Settings”
Tom
Focusing on a well search engine optimized website is difficult and time-consuming. On top of that, the rules are always changing. So, why bother yourself following complicated techniques that work today and expire tomorrow?
That’s why I totally agree with you that we should build a website around a high quality content. Today, even the search engines take user-friendly and rich-content websites more seriously.
Nothing is more powerful than word-of-mouth marketing. If you provide with pure content on your site, the users themselves would spread the word and promote your web pages. It could be sharing your links, subscribing to your feed and even sending your site as an email message to their friends and family.
On the other hand, knowing some basic rules of SEO is not a bad idea. You want your readership to find you first. So, making a website optimized for search engines by doing some basic actions is effective and necessary.
You have covered everything that is needed to be thought for beginners in order to get ranking in the search results.
Thanks again for this amazing article. Hope everybody finds it useful.
To Your Success!
Hooshmand Moslemi
Glad I got 5 of the 8 going for me right now. Very good tips Darren, especially the content is king point.
Writing style is also an important factor that determines blog traffic. Some people have got a very interesting style of writing which makes their blogs popular.
Many thanks – as a new blogger at http://whatawebsite.org/ the tips above will be very useful.
Best wishes from Hamburg
Will McCulloch
Very nice post Darren, really helpful.
The Seo is a world, and there is really much to learn in this domain.
Thanks for Sharing
Once again, your information is extremely useful to bloggers who are just starting out! Thank you for all your support.
I have always subscribed to the strategy of focusing primarily on giving search engines what they are looking for (useful content which people respond to) instead of getting overly involved in mechanics. Though it is important to understand mechanics as well. I agree thoroughly with your “hunch” at the end of the post.
Excellent points. Content is king. Don’t spend all your time focusing on SEO. And definitely — readers do beget readers. Those are also my experiences. I also love your suggestions at the beginning of t he post. Very useful post!
krissy knox :)
follow me on twitter:
http://twitter.com/iamkrissy
Hi Darren,
Just to confirm your hunch – it has been discussed among the “SEOs” that social network links (i.e post shares, twitter links, ect) seem to play into both search and local search algorithms.
The fact is search algorithms are designed to qualify relevant and quality content, and the major search engines will continue to build algorithms to do so. This is why content is king, and always will be.
If your building a blog that you only want for one week, then go ahead and gamble with algorithm manipulation.
Cheers,
Kris
P.s. From my tests social network/media backlinks can definitely accelerate the positive search rankings – get people retweeting!
This is a great article. SEO is something that I stink at. I really need to work on this on my blog because my traffic from search engines sucks.
I enabled SEF links on my site. But some of the tips will be difficult, like keywords in the post, since alot of my content is funny pics and stuff – where to put key words?
I know I have to work at it if I want the search engines to notice me.
wow, this one is incredible tips!
thank you so much for your tips.
Yep, Fantastic. Have to agree, content is King. Have good content and the readers will come. Too often young bloggers think that one just has to put words up onto the site, and readers will come.
No way, IT is hard work.
I never though of the importance of in house linking between posts. I try to do this every time, but do forget sometime. But yes, once I started to do this, I say page rank increase, inbound links increase, page views increase. It just makes sense.
A good title will not only grab Google’s attention, but the attention of readers. I spend a good portion of my blogging time trying to come up with the most appropriate title.
Thanks for this
For sharing thank you very much good very beautiful work
Great article, for someone like me who’s just starting out it’s a great read!
Thanks
Anthony
My son told me to check out your blog and I must say I’m impressed, very helpful.