Wednesday 12 December 2012

TOP 10 SEO TIPS FOR BLOGGERS

As president and CEO of Submit Express, I personally oversee the operations of several company blogs and often author industry-related articles. From years of experience in operating mainly WordPress-based blogs, I have learned valuable lessons on how to optimize blogs for search engines and increase traffic to the sites. Here are my Top 10 SEO tips for bloggers; I hope these insightful tips can help improve your blog’s SEO.

1. Conduct proper keyword research and use keywords in your title and content. The title in your home page is the most important place to feature your most important keywords. When you post new articles, keep in mind that most blog platforms will make your article title the HTML title tag as well. Therefore, create your titles with keywords you want to target.

2. Be familiar with your blogging platform to use built-in SEO features. Install additional SEO pluggins. For WordPress, "All in One SEO" or "Platinum SEO" is recommended. They offer many settings that help to create a more SEO-friendly site.

3. Use SEO-friendly URLs. Basically adding keywords in your URLs is a good idea. In WordPress, this is done by turning on a function called "Permalinks."

4. Write original content. Do not copy content from other sites, and if you do, make sure to rewrite it completely to make it your own. More often than not, duplicate content gets filtered by the search engines.

5. Write blog posts on a regular basis and cover the latest topics and trends, which tend to get more traffic while they are hot. Fresh content is part of Google's algorithm.

6. Optimize your image names and alt tags to include keywords for better placement in the image search portion of the search engines.

7. Publish links to your posts on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Also, submit them to social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon and Reddit. Social media involvement and links are good for SEO purposes.

8. Build links to your main page and internal posts. If you own several blogs, try to find similar posts and link them to each other.

9. Write guest blog posts on similar sites for link building purposes. A good way to do this is to ask other bloggers to exchange articles, with guest blog credits. You can also participate in link exchange with other bloggers from blogrolls, but in general try to not have too many outgoing links from your own blogroll, as it may reduce the value of your website.

10. Go easy on importing RSS feeds into your blog. While it could be a good source for additional content, you want the majority of your content to be original. If you’re going to use RSS feeds, I recommend keeping it to less than 10 percent of your overall content. If your regular content does not keep up with that ratio, then remove old RSS posts regularly. There was a time when the "Autobloged" plugin for WordPress was being used by many bloggers, or I should say spammy bloggers, with great success. Sites would receive a massive amount of content in little time and would end up getting hundreds of rankings. However, the Panda update makes this difficult.


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