SEO For Blogging

The Basics

Key SEO Concepts to Consider   Title – The first opportunity to add a keyword phrase and one of the

most important.  Obviously, the search engines look to the post title as one of the factors when indexing and ranking the content.

A Few More SEO tips on title tags:• Apart from the actual post name and blog name, it might be useful

to add relevant keywords to your title tag, too. Of course, this means doing your keyword research in advance.

• Don’t keyword-spam your title tags, though. Try to limit yourself to 70 characters. Longer titles may be cropped by search engines as the results appear in search.

• Always check your spellings. A small type error may be all that’s stopping you from achieving great things with your title tags.

URL Structure

URL / Link – Ensure you have a contextually appropriate link structure that utilizes the post’s title.

• Bad• “http://insight.eyetraffic.com/

rofoaefapefjaf453vmlaf321maf”• Good –“

http://insight.eyetraffic.com/why-content-creation-is-good-for-seo/”

• Edit this in the “Permalink Settings”:

H1 & H2 Generally you will have your site title as the H1,

and the blog post titles as H2s. On individual post pages, have the post titles as

the H1 - this ensures that you have unique H1s on each page, as your homepage won't repeat your latest blog title, and the page title will match the H1, both of which are good for SEO.

It's also semantically correct as on the homepage you will have multiple, equally important titles that are "children" of the homepage.

URL Structure

Excerpt

Excerpt – This text will show below the article link when searching in Google.

Description

Description – in the “All in One SEO Pack”

Contextual Links & Anchors

Contextual hyperlinks - when linking to other web pages and content.  Hyperlink the appropriate keyword phrase with the link creating anchor text for the engines to spot

• Good – “for more detail, read my recent post What is Social SEO?…”

• Bad – “for more detail, read my recent post What is Social SEO? http://insight.eyetraffic.com/what-is-social-seo/”

• Bad – ““for more detail, read my recent post What is Social SEO? Click here…”

Body

Body copy• Don’t spam your post!• Use 3-5% keyword density. By 3% I mean your

keyword or phrase is used three times out of 100 words. One good way to make sure you use your keyword or phrase this amount of times is to start with the title and pepper it into the first and last paragraphs of your blog post.

• Use keywords naturally as they would occur in conversation. Write for the reader. If it’s natural to them, it will seem natural to the search engines

Post Tags

You can add keywords to the “”Post Tag” field. Generally the most common tags may added from an existing tag cloud. It is not necessary to use multiple variations of tags.

Tags or Keywords

• Keep in mind that tags are not always going to be keywords related to the post. For example, if you are writing a post and somehow you use McDonalds in the post, McDonalds may be a good tag but not necessarily a keyword or key phrase with search relevance to the post.

• Here’s the reason: the All-In-One SEO Pack uses KEYWORDS, not tags. What’s the difference, you may ask. Well, apparently, Google thinks there’s a big difference, and announced about a year and a half ago that it ignores keywords altogether with regard to blogs. In fact, if you continue to do it on a regular basis (as you would with a blog), the search engines may see it as “keyword stuffing” and block your site altogether.

Images

Tagging Images and Multimedia• Tagging images and posts in WordPress

is an automated process.  It will insert the code, but you must follow the process and enter the correct info to properly tag an image.

• Images that are not optimized correctly appear as junk, or empty space to search engines

Images

Add a “Title” and keywords in the “Alternate Text” field.  The “Caption” and “Description” fields do not have benefit for the image itself.

Other on-page elements

1. Relevancy

2. Images (correct alt+title text)

3. Bulletpoints when applicable

4. Not too much other crap (low content:crap ratio)

5. Outbound links (to high quality resources)

Robots & <head>

Edit your robots.txt • Editing your robots.txt files is very simple: you

can edit them straight from All-in-one SEO plugin, so you can easily check and or update those files and keep it all nice and clean.

• Index/Follow vs. nofollow/noindex• As simple as it sounds• Clean up head section WordPress has added more and more bloat to

the <head> section of WordPress installs. Luckily it also has methods to remove those.

Tools• Google AdWords Keyword Tool• Search by word, phrase, or URL• Google AdWords Traffic Estimator• Very useful for the SEO services provider to get search

volume data and estimated daily clicks by geographic area.

• SpyFu Find out what the competition is targeting in your niche

• GoRank.com Check your keyword density• AdCenter Labs Keyword Forecast is a nice tool from

adCenter Labs allowing you to compare keyword impressions over time while providing basic demographics for each term.