SEO is not a particularly hot topic these days, but SEO remains an important part of improving your presence in Google searches, and therefore getting the resulting traffic. A great article published just a few days ago onBusiness2Community.com outlines many of the important components and techniques that add to the SEO-strength of your blog posts.
Once you have been exposed to SEO for years (like I have) you start to think a lot of this is common sense – and really is common sense once you understand a few basic starting points. But it still helps to review these principles, and occasionally you will find something you hadn’t thought of.
Here, in summary form, are some of the author’s main points and my comments:
1. Do your keyword research – Frankly I dislike the traditional focus on keywords. It seems to get things bass-akwards. But tracking your traffic with a utility like Webmaster Tools or Histats will show you where your traffic is coming from. And it will reinforce the notion that you should at least give a look at what people are responding to. If you find, as in the case of one of my blogs, that a particular keyword is getting a fair bit of Google love (in my case one example is win a guitar), then that gives you good reason to focus on that (or related) keywords, or at least try to develop other similar attractive content.
2. Create an Editorial Calendar – This is like a “To Do” list for a blogger. The concept sounds good – make a list of topics and keywords you should cover on a systematic basis – but I am particularly bad at sticking to such a schedule. Anyway, the idea that this should be keyword-centric, again, seems obvious once you state it, but very easy to forget in the heat of battle.
3. Create SEO-Friendly Copy – Blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard this a thousand times. Over the years this has morphed from “pack your content with specific keywords” to “write in a natural, unique way – but remember to specifically include the important keywords”. This last point about “including your important keywords” is my emphasis, not the article author’s.
It often surprises me how I can say things that are on topic, but don’t actually use the keywords I’m trying to focus on. “Win a Guitar” is a good example. Does “Guitar Contest” have a direct bearing on “win a guitar”? How about “free guitar”? Or “enter to win guitar gear”? Over the years we’ve come to assume that Google will read between the lines- but judging from typical search results there is still a lot of literal stuff going on. In other words, don’t just mean it, say it.
4. Consider the Reader Experience – Yeah, I know we today assume Google takes “reader experience” into consideration. And so we are encouraged to use bullet points, bolded sub-heads, and other visual formatting techniques to make our content more readable. I suspect this has more to do with getting people to actually read our stuff – and perhaps share or link to it – than it does to actual on-page SEO. But who knows? I certainly don’t. The bottom line is you should do these things because it makes sense to do them.
5. Create a Good Headline – Yes, I agree, catchy, original headlines make a difference. But I doubt this is an SEO issue. It is more a question of getting attention. SEO-friendly headlines (ones meant to get the attention of Google, Bing, etc.) do not have to be tricky, witty, catchy, etc. They have to say something specific.
6. Use the Correct Anchor Text for Your Outbound Links – This seems pretty obvious once it’s been brought to your attention. But it is still easy to slip into unhelpful-anchor-text mode. For example, to use my “win a guitar” example, I regularly create posts for contests on different sites, and I include an “Enter here” link. That’s not a very SEO friendly use of anchor text. It would be better to say “Enter here –Win a Fender Guitar” with “Win a Fender Guitar” being the anchor text.
7. Tags Are Not Very Important – I’ve always wondered about this. If Google is so great at analyzing my actual content why do they need me to tell them what they already know.
8. Include Great Looking Images – From the SEO point of view a “great-looking” image is no more useful than an ugly one. But that is a sort of shallow way to look at it. The simplistic SEO value of images is enhance by doing things like naming the images correctly and including specific metadata about them. But more subtly, images increase reader interest and stickiness. and that has a direct impact on Google’s ranking of your content.
9. Adding Metadata – More than having specific SEO value (like tags) metadata is useful as descriptive material for search engines (shows up in searches) and will therefore have a bearing on click-thru rate.
10. Social Content Sharing – Sharing of your SEO optimized content should have a reinforcing value. Not in the old sense of simply piling up inbound links. That may or may not be important – it depends on other things. But effective social sharing increases your exposure and therefore your readership. And increased readership (traffic, stickiness, comments, shares, etc.) enhances the extent to which Google considers your content worth being listed. At least that’s the theory.
via:http://linknetsocialmedia.com/some-seo-tips-for-bloggers-making-google-friendly-posts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=some-seo-tips-for-bloggers-making-google-friendly-posts
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