SEO is an important part of running a successful blog, but you don’t need an overly complicated strategy to get things going.
You’re far better off sticking to a few best practices and then learning ‘on the job’ as you become a more committed publisher and blogger (unless you have the luxury of hiring out your SEO).
So keeping in mind that most people know a lot more about the idea of SEO than the step-by-step process of optimizing a blog, here are the skills you can use to build a smart blog today:
CMS — Which One is Right For You?
CMS stands for content management system. If you’re familiar with WordPress or Blogger then you’ve used a CMS system. Whenever I speak with business owners and friends about making a smart SEO decision when it comes to running their blog, I always recommend WordPress. The reason is that WordPress makes organizing your content in a way that is friendly to the search engines very, very simple.
Building new pages, adding links and scheduling content are extremely easy when you have the right CMS. So for all of you readers who have yet to choose a platform, consider WordPress above all others. If you can use Microsoft Word, you will be able to use WordPress, no sweat.
Categories and Internal Linking
Categories are an important part of telling the search engines what your blog content is about, so I recommend you create at least three to five distinct categories for new content. When you create a new post, click the box for the category it falls under.
We can take this a step further by optimizing the URL’s that are created for each post, based on categories we just set up. Whoa, let me take a step back, I don’t want to lose you.
See, our overall goal is to market our content as highly relevant to Google and other search engines. The easier our site is to crawl, and the better our roadmap, the higher we rank in organic search results (this is a little simplified, but it’s basically true).
One of the critical elements of making our pages easy to index and ‘decode’ is a keyword friendly URL. What I mean is that you make sure each URL for your blog posts contain relevant terms directly related to the post topic. So by changing the permalink structure of your blog, you can add the category into every URL.
This is simpler than it sounds.
Just head to ‘Settings’, then ‘Permalinks’ if you’re in WordPress, and select the radio button next to ‘Custom’. Finally, enter the following code into the box next to ‘Custom’:
/%category%/%postname%
That code will tell WordPress, our CMS, to label each blog post as follows:
www.yourblogtitle/category/blog-post-title
Now, just by planning ahead, you can ensure each new post receives a more keyword friendly URL. So what about internal linking? Isn’t that important too? Yes!
Linking your pages together is an easy, yet often overlooked, key to a smart SEO solution. The easiest way to link properly is to think about web pages like ‘the buddy system’. When you were a kid in school, I’ll bet you had to cross the road with a ‘buddy’ to make sure you crossed safely. The same idea works for web pages.
At the bottom of a page, link to your contact page or another relevant spot that allows readers to dive more deeply into your site. This helps grow time spent with your site and shares the link love across your entire blog. The end goal here is to create strong incentives for people to keep reading your content (and rank higher in the search results, of course).
Alt Text and Final Thoughts
This may seem basic, but if you’re linking to a page on your site, don’t fall into the trap of making the link text say ‘click here’ or ‘more info’. Instead, choose descriptive text that directly pertains to the page people will be visiting.
Why is this important?
In a word, habits. Linking internally with relevant text will tell the search engines what the pages you link to are about, which is an SEO thumbs up. However it also puts you in the habit of linking more courteously to others, and if you are a real stud, will encourage you to ask others to link to your pages with specific alt text.
When you can gain links from high quality sources that contain relevant alt text, you will notice a bump in the SERPs.
Finally, consider external links from free directories. These are valuable links to be had and can be found for just about every interest, topic or industry. Explore Yelp, Merchant Circle, Brown Book and more industry specific directories when you have the time. Submitting to these sites is not a waste of time if you provide a simple hook for people to come to your blog, along with a picture…and don’t forget to link back to your blog!
Well, this is a good start. I promise to write more on SEO basics later, but it’s late and I need to stop thinking of SEO and get some SLEEP.