Optimizing your blog posts with SEO is actually quite simple if you follow these 12 simple steps. Now don't worry if SEO scares you because it's really not that difficult to implement these things to make the search engines love your blog posts.
Now none of these steps really matter too much without proper keyword research. Make sure you know what keywords your ranking for before you implement these items. So... let's get on with the show.
1. Keyword In The Domain - If at all possible, try and get the keywords you're ranking for in your domain name. Now this doesn't work if this is your personal blog because you usually using your own name and that's not the keywords your targeting.
2. Keyword In The Title - This should be pretty obvious but the key here really is to get your keyword closest to the beginning of your title. This helps the search engines recognize what your article is about. If you have long tail keywords, do your best to keep all of them together while making the title sound exciting, inspiring and interesting. Remember, a good title is what draws people in.
3. Keyword In The Url - Some people overlook this important step, but it's wise to never skip this step. The url is the part that comes after the domain name like yourdomain.com/your-keyword-goes-here/. So the /your-keyword-goes-here/ is where your keyword should go. Now if you have a long title like I do above, you should be able to edit the url when you're editing the blog post.
4. Keywords In The H1, H2, H3 Tags - So your first question might be "What are H1 tags?" On any word document or when you use the "visual" tab when editing your blog post, you will have a drop down menu that usually is defaulted to "normal". You can search for Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on. When you use these formats in your post, the size of the wording changes, but more importantly the search engines use these tags to identify what the article is about.
5. Keyword In The First Sentence - This is important again because the search engines want to see that the content being provided is relevant to the keywords right from the beginning. If you are targeting "fish hooks" but the first sentence talks about "polar bear video games", Houston... We have a problem!
6. Keyword In The Last Sentence - This is best used as a conclusion to sum up your blog post.
7. Keyword Density 2%-4% - Pay very close attention to this part of SEO. The worst thing you can do is "spam" your article with your keyword every few seconds. It's not natural and the search engines know that. So out of a 500 word article 10-15 times total is okay but don't force them in there just to hit your mark. Keeping the post natural sounding is the most important thing.
8. One Internal Targeted Link - This is important to build quality back links to your own site and even possibly promote other items in your blog if it's relevant to the article. So to optimize SEO for this post, I'll link to my homepage.
9. One Outboard Authority Link - This is important so you build a credible back link from a website that has high Page Rank and is relevant to your site. That's important because if your site is about "fish hooks", link to a top site about fish hooks. Remember, it's all about relevancy.
10. Keyword Optimized Images - The easiest thing you can do here is to do 2 things... Make the image name(s) the same as your keywords and change the "alt text" to your keywords. If you don't know what "alt text" is, don't worry about it and just make sure the image names are correct.
11. Bold, Italicize & Underline - I would recommend doing this at least once in your blog post. Don't go crazy with this as if a reader sees "fish hooks" in bold every single time, it just does NOT look right and it seems fishy (excuse the pun).
12. 500 Words Of Relevant Content - The optimal range is 500 but really never go lower than 300 and higher than 700 words.
Bottom line with all of this is the search engines are looking for relevancy. They want to see that the ad your customer clicked has the same keywords ad the page they landed on and is congruent with the content on the page. It's that simple. So when optimizing your blog posts for SEO, just remember to keep everything relevant, follow these 12 simple steps and watch your organic search rankings soar!
Gerek Allen is an entrepreneur, digital marketing specialist and Internet marketer. To learn more tips, techniques and strategies from Gerek, visit him at
http://www.GerekAllen.com
