The Best SEO Advice For Bloggers

Blogs are by nature very search engine friendly, but there are some things you can do to make sure you rank well in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Here's my best SEO advice for bloggers. Take some of these suggestions, implement them and see if you don't start noticing an increase in traffic and readers.

Do Your Keyword Research

Start by finding out exactly what your potential readers are searching for. You can use free keyword tools like the Google keyword one, or the free version of Wordtracker. Personally, I like using the paid Wordtracker, but either option will do.

Enter one of the main keywords around your blog into the search tool and start putting together a list of keywords you can then use in your main blog title, category names and of course the titles of individual blog posts.

Optimize Your Blog's Title

Take a look at your keyword list and find a general keyword that best describes what your blog is about. You want to find a keyword that gets quite a bit of traffic. For one of my sites for example, my main blog keyword is "affiliate marketing blog". Use the keyword as early as possible in your blog title.

Install Permalinks

Having your keywords in the URL also helps. An easy way to do this is to set your permalinks to be the name or title of the post. In WordPress you use the %postname% token to do this. You only need to set this up one time and from here on out each post URL will be the name of your post.

Use All-In-One SEO

Install and use the All-in-One SEO plugin (again if you are using WordPress to manage your blog). It allows you to include a title, description and keywords. Make sure you include your keyword for each post in this section.

Take Advantage Of Tags

Tags not only make it easy for readers to search your blog, they can help with search engine rankings as well. Use your keyword as a tag for each post. I also like to include additional tags with similar keywords as well as singular or plural versions (for example "affiliate blog" and "affiliate blogs").

Set Up A Ping List

Last but not least, make sure you set up a good ping list on your blog. This will allow search engine "spiders" to quickly find, index and rank your new content.