Improving the Search Engine Rankings of Your Blog

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If you are a blogger who is interested in reaching a large audience with their blog you should consider paying special attention to search engine optimization (SEO) of your blog. Reaching a large audience may be a priority for a number of different reasons.

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One of the obvious reasons is to attempt to generate increased organic traffic to a blog and generate an income. Some bloggers who rely on high blog traffic for their revenue are obviously interested in increasing traffic. However, if you have created your blog to promote a cause you may also be interested in increasing traffic simply to allow your message to reach a larger audience.

Regardless of your reason... increasing traffic is a must, one of the best ways to do this is by optimizing your blog for the search engines.  

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The importance of search engine rankings

Let's run through some tips for optimizing your blog and explain why Search Engine Rankings are important.

The importance of high search engine rankings is they can contribute to increased Internet traffic to the blog. This is because Internet users who use search engines to find information on a particular topic are much more likely to visit websites which appear on the first page of the search results than they are to visit websites which appear on subsequent pages of the search results. The websites appearing on the first page of the results are likely to get the most traffic.

It's stated that only 2% of people look further down the rankings than page 1... that's not good news if you are looking for organic traffic.

High search engine rankings essentially act as free advertisement for a blog or website. This is because many website users rely on popular search engines to assist them in finding useful information on the Internet. The search engines apply complex algorithms to evaluate websites and rank them accordingly for specific search terms.

As a result Internet users put a great deal of value on the search results produced and trust these results to lead them to the best available websites relevant to the keywords they specified in the search.

Tips for Optimizing a Blog for Search Engines

One of the most common ways to optimize a blog or website for search engines is through the use of relevant keywords. Specifically the practice of applying specific keyword densities to the content of the blog is a common search engine optimization tactic employed. Blog owners and others who attempt to optimize their websites do not always agree on the optimal density for keywords but many believe a percentage of approximately 2%-3% is appropriate.

Thrive Architect Plugin

If you are using WordPress as your choice of platform then I would recommend using the plugin called SEO Yoast ​this will help you achieve the correct keyword densities and a lot more too...

seo yoast wordpress plugin

You can find relevant keywords by using Googles Keyword Planner, this not only shows how many searches have been made but also the competition. You would be looking for keywords (or phrases) that have a high monthly search but low competition. Depending on your niche long tail keyword phrases although less monthly searches can produce better results especially when the competition is low.

I personally use Market Samurai for all my Keyword Research​ as you can see from the screenshot below it does far more than just Keyword research.

market samurai keyword tool

Another method for optimizing a search engine optimization is to place relevant keywords into the code of the website. This includes the title tags and META tags. This is important because search engines often consider the prominence of keywords when evaluating a website. This refers to the location in which the keywords first appear. Placing keywords early in the content of the website is helpful but it is important to note the search engines view the code first so keywords appearing before the body of the blog will be crawled first by the search engines.

Blog owners can also help to increase their search engine rankings by generating back links to their blog. This can be accomplished in a number of different ways. One way to do this is to find other websites willing to place a link to the blog on their website. This is beneficial because many search engines factor the number of links to a website into their ranking algorithm because these links are considered to be one website vouching for the validity of another website.

Learn more about back linking on this post from Matthew Woodward

Some website owners may be willing to do this in return for a link to their website on your blog. This is known as reciprocal linking and some search engines may not value this link as highly as a link which is not reciprocated. There are also some link exchange programs but these links may not be beneficial because many search engines consider the rank of the website linking to your blog. Therefore, if the website linking to your blog does not rank well, the back link will not improve search engine rankings significantly.

Most bloggers place images in their blog posts which helps break up the text, create interest and hold the reader for longer on the page. But what a lot don't do is keyword these images. The Google bots can not read images so by added keywords in a description on the image, not only helps Google read them, but tells Google what keywords they are relevant too. 

seo wordpress blog

You can do this by adding information to the image such in the Alt tags area. In WordPress this is very easy to do. Open the image and make sure the title and alt text areas have relevant keywords for what you want to rank for. 

If you have any questions relating to these tips, drop me a comment below and I will be glad to assist you. 

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By graphicsman

Martin is the CEO of Designed 4 U which help small businesses and entrepreneurs to succeed online. He has over 19 years experience in the graphics industry, and has worked alongside some of the top social media and online marketers over the past 8 years.

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