What is Blog SEO ?
This is quite a common question and a fairly simple one to answer, so I shall attempt to keep this post brief. I am also assuming that you will be doing this manually, as opposed to using one of the WordPress plug-ins, which will do some, but not all of it for you.
Remember that although many businesses write blog posts as a way of updating their news pages or perhaps technical updates etc, these should still be optimised for the search engines (and specifically Google) if possible. Even if only 100 people a month search for the topic you have published a post about , if yours is the only optimised resource on this subject, you are likely to appear top of the search engines, therefore get the clicks and if you incorporate links to other sections of your website you just might steer some of those visitors to your sales pages.
Just remember that for all the effort which goes into creating those high quality news stories, product descriptions or white papers, a few more minutes can turn them into part of your companies marketing campaign and drive more potential customers to your website.
So I’m going to assume here that you know enough about your website and/or business to write compelling and informative content about it, either that or you have somebody else within the organisation creating it for you. Remember this absolutely MUST be unique content.
Keyword Research
You should be looking for keywords which are closely related to your article, yet do not have huge volumes of competition if possible, read my article on keyword research if you are unsure how to find them.
Choose a Primary and Secondary Term
So for example, this blog post is optimised for the terms “Blog SEO” as my primary keyword phrase and “SEO for Blog” as a secondary one. I personally only ever have 2 terms per page these days. The reason being that I can always easily find 2 closely complementary terms without having to spend ages on the research, plus, with so many websites out there targeting accurately makes life much easier, be it on a whole website or a single page.
On-Page SEO for Blog Posts
There are a few places which are essential to use the keyword, first and foremost is in the title tag, next is in the navigation to the page, then the h1 or h2 tags, somewhere in the body of the post itself and again in the image alt tags if you have graphics on the page.
If using WordPress you can use plug-ins to automatically turn specific phrases throughout your site into keyword rich links to the page, or you can of course do it manually.
General Blog SEO
As with any content, unless you are extremely lucky or incredibly clever (unfortunately I am neither so do it the long hand way) you will need inbound keyword rich links pointing to your post, these can come from social channels such as twitter and facebook, other blogs and websites or anywhere else you can think of that either a little link love will be passed or somebody will actually click the link and be sent flying back to your website, or ideally both.
Of course, as soon as you have done the seo for this post, you should be thinking about the next one, remember it’s content, content, content these days.