Basic SEO Tips for Blogs

While your business blog may have lots of strong content, it still needs to be found by the search engines. Fortunately, there are many ways for you or your agency to make blogs more SEO-friendly. Here are a few.

• Change the permalink structure (permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts). By default, WordPress attaches a number to each page on your site and displays that in the URL. Under the WordPress Internet “Settings” section, click “Permalinks” and you can customize the URL structure as desired. Preferably, you want the title of the page in the URL. You can also change the permalink structure of Blogger blogs by editing the code.
• Upload images to your posts and optimize them using image titles and alt tags. Link photos taken by others to the appropriate site (a Flickr photo should be linked to the Flickr profile where it came from, for example), especially if you’re using Creative Commons content (royalty-free images that usually require an image credit).
• Send Google an XML sitemap. This will help Google index your site faster and makes it easier to search your site (meaning: it will help your site rank in the search results more effectively). Install a plug-in such as Google XML Sitemaps and let it do the work for you.
• Be consistent in your “slugs.” The “slug” of your blog post is the part of the URL that you can customize, right below the title of the post. Have the title match the slug for better rankings—most blogging platforms do this automatically (i.e., yoursite.com/blog/keywords-in-url).
• Make use of internal links, which are links from one page of your site to another page on your site. Doing this increases search engine rankings and also keeps readers on your site for longer periods of time.
• Install a WordPress SEO plug-in like the “All In One SEO Pack.”
• Link to related posts using a plug-in that creates a “read more” section below each post. This is great for internal linking, as well as keeping the reader on your site longer.
• Make your post titles “live” links to the post. Most WordPress themes and Blogger designs already do this automatically, but it does help in your rankings.
• Validate the code on your site. The W3C Markup Validation Service will find any errors in your code so that you can clean it up. Having a valid site from a technical standpoint is crucial for those wishing to rank highly on search engines like Google.
• By installing a plug-in such as Sociable, ShareThis, or Social by MailChimp, you can put social media buttons at the end of every blog post. This allows your readers to click the button to share your post on their Facebook or Twitter page if they think it’s something interesting and worth sharing.

Photo credit: andercismo / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA