Because blogs naturally offer new content to search engines, you might think you can skip optimizing your blog. In our latest series, here are some ideas you can use to attract search engines to your blog.
Part 1 of 4: Start with Quality Content on a Specific Topic
Quality Content
The best way to get links to your blog is to write quality content that people will want to read. This is still the cheapest and probably safest approach toward to build inbound links in a natural organic way because others want to link to quality content.
Keyword Rich Content
Consider: “How will I want people to find this post in Search Engines?” What will readers type into Google to find the information on the topic you’re writing? Use your answers to identify a few keywords (go for 3-5) for the article you hope to get highly-indexed. Then pepper those keywords throughout your post, as well as in titles, heading tags, image alt tags, and meta tags.
Try for One Topic per Post
The more tightly you focus the theme of a post, the better for Search Engine ranking. If you find you are writing a long post that covers a number of loosely-related or different topics, contemplate breaking it up into smaller, more-concentrated pieces. Note that research shows that longer articles can have a pretty steep drop off rate in readers after the text gets below the ‘fold’ or to the end of the first screen of article.
Write Optimal Length Posts
Now that you don’t want to write posts that are too long; don’t make them too short either. Search Engines just might pass them over. A good rule of thumb: 250 words per post will give it some length, meatiness, and keyword density.
Bigger is Better
It’s true that bigger sites tend to rank better than smaller sites because Search Engines see your site as more comprehensive. Also, the more pages you have, the better your odds of being found in Search Engines. However don’t just to put up random junk content be or be spammy and duplicate your content everywhere either. Work at building a large site over time.
Update Regularly
The more you update your blog, the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This will mean your new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. This is a natural benefit of blogging – make the most of it!
Next up? Part 2: Linking Strategy
Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.