Your Blog posts can gain just as much traction online as a web page if properly optimized. This is not to say every post must be optimized since we love to rant or vent or just share sometimes. But for those posts that you really want to be found long after you have dimmed the light from the screen then you must optimize them accordingly. As I previously discussed in SEO going Social, you will still need relevant information out there that someone wants to read but finding it is going to be different. You will need to title your blogs and give them a description that draws people in to want more. They will find your information on their friend's Facebook or Digg.com and then share with their group of friends if they find it share-worthy.
Here are 3 steps for optimizing your blog posts:
1. Write your post first then optimize it later. You want to be found for related searches and similar content as well so once it's written determine the best keywords or phrases and add them naturally into your content. Remember to use your heading tags in the code to allow that phrase to jump out to Google and your readers. If it doesn't read right people are not going to follow your thought process no matter how many keywords you have dispersed throughout. Make sure its legible, understandable and something that people would want to talk about, not just read about.
2. Be creative on your meta descriptions. While meta keywords (those on the back end of the site that you enter separately from the post) are not that important any longer, your description is very vital to optimizing a blog post or page. You want about 150 characters in your description before Google and other search engines start cutting you off so make sure you give your reader everything they need to know for clicking to read more in that short synopsis of your post or page. While some blog posts don't allow you to type in a description separately [ActiveRain], Google and others will take the first 150 characters from the beginning of the post, so make sure its a good one.
3. Link related posts and pages within your article. You want your reader to stay on your blog or website as long as possible and by leaving breadcrumbs from one related post to another takes your reader on a journey to learn as much as they can about you, the content and the information. You don't want so many links however that your blog plays like the start of a movie (so many trailers we forgot what we were here to see in the first place). Give your audience just enough to keep them going and make sure there is always a way to contact you for your business, service or help. Don't just give us a list of links at the end of the blog but link it within the content itself. Think of Wikipedia; they link related terms, keywords, landmarks and definitions all the time so at any time you are reading and want to know more you can click through to learn additional information on that topic. Write your blog posts this way.
Of course the title of your blog post is going to be HUGE!! That's where it's at. Once you have that title mastered, work on optimizing the entire blog post to live long after its scrolled off the proverbial page.
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