How to Optimize Your Blog

This is a guest article by Amanda. You should voice your opinions by taking a look at our guest blogging guidelines.

Everyone is writing their own blog today, and it is a great opportunity to have the world view your opinions, tips, art and stories. A blog can quickly make someone into a thought leader in their industry, but it does not come easily. If you want your blog to be taken seriously, you will need to know how to optimize your blog.

Optimizing your blog is not as easy as clicking a button and hoping everyone will arrive to your site. There are multiple actions most Internet marketing companies would recommend you can take to make your blog more accessible and user friendly. Your blog should bring readers in, keep them interested while they are there, and keep them coming back in the future. Here are several ways you can begin to optimize your blog.

Keywords

One of the only ways people are going to find your blog is by searching for keywords. Each blog post needs to be focused on a small set of keywords. Those keywords also need to show up in the title tags, meta description, custom URL, and even alt text for any images in the post. When you help a search engine like Google identify that your blog post is relevant to the keyword, you will increase your ranking in the search results. A good rule of thumb is to use 1-2 keywords per post and repeat them each 2-3 times within the body of your post.

URL Structure

A lot of people will not realize that they can customize exactly how their blog’s URL’s are formed. In order to optimize your blog, you will need to change the structure to include the title of your blog post in the URL itself. Additionally, it may be a good idea on some blogs to include the category of your blog post in the custom URL.

Sitemaps

Search engine bots will crawl all over your blog, trying to decipher what you offer the world. A lot of times, the bots can get lost and leave your site without reading every page. In order to prevent that, and make it easier on the bots, create a sitemap that tells them exactly what pages you have on your site and where they are. This is also helpful for users who are looking for a specific page on your blog.

Snippets

Most blog services offer a place for you to enter a compelling snippet that describes the content of your post. This snippet will show up in the search engines rather than simply the first 3 lines of text on your post. A user will know ahead of time exactly what your post is about if you write strong descriptions.

RSS Feed

Many blogs today do not offer their visitors an easy option to subscribe to their blog via RSS feed. RSS allows people to easily digest all of their favorite blogs’ content on their own reader such as Google Reader. This is a very important step to help bring your visitors back to your site and stay updated with your content. Without an RSS feed, there is no way for your visitors to know when you post something new. Many RSS services also offer a tool to allow your visitors to subscribe by email, delivering your content directly to their inbox.

When you know how to search engine optimize your blog, search engines will begin to value your content more and visitors will come more often and stay longer. There are multiple other tips you can use to optimize your blog, and each blog service can be different. Simply search for exactly what you are trying to do on your blog and someone likely posted a guide on how to do it. Optimizing your blog is an important step to grow your web presence.