On-site SEO: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts
by Matt on Jul 19, 2010 in Blogging, MY BEST POSTS
(This is the third of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. Future editions will be published on the next two Mondays.)
In the first two articles of this series, we’ve introduced SEO and covered some of the most important SEO decisions that should be thought about before you start blogging. In this article, we’ll assume you’ve addressed those issues, your blog is setup correctly, and you’re ready to start writing. Before you actually put fingers to keyboard, though, here’s what you need to know about optimizing your blog and your blog content.
First, a disclaimer: When it comes to writing individual blog posts, I don’t really care about SEO 100% of the time. Some of the blog posts I write (on all of my blogs, not just the hyperlocal ones) don’t need SEO; some are written fully for my readers and I don’t care or expect them to ever rank well in search engine results. So, please understand that, when I talk about optimizing an individual blog post, I realize you may not need to do that on everything you publish. With that in mind, let’s get started.
Keyword Research
Keyword research helps you understand what people search for at Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and how they search — the words they use. This is important because it helps you write the best headlines and blog posts possible.
Example: You might write a really great blog post about tourist attractions in your hometown — let’s say you live in Portland — and your headline is “Top Tourist Attractions in Portland.” And in your blog post, you use that phrase a few times more because you want your article to rank well when people search for “tourist attractions in portland” and phrases like that.
If you had done some keyword research, though, you would’ve learned that many more people search for “things to do in portland” than for “tourist attractions portland.” Have a look:
As you can see, more people are searching for “things to do” in Portland, so your post would have a chance at more search engine traffic if you had used that phrase, instead.
How to Research Keywords
There are a number of keyword research tools online: Some are free, some aren’t, and some have both paid and free options. Here’s a quick list of places you can do some keyword research:
- Keyword Discovery — as of this writing, offers a free trial as well as paid options
- Wordtracker — ditto
- WordStream — ditto
- Google AdWords Keyword Tool — free, may soon be changing to a new URL
- Google’s Search-based keyword tool — free
- Wordtracker Keyword Questions — cool tool that shows what questions people ask on search engines; great way to get content ideas; Keyword Discovery offers a similar product
- Google Insights for Search — free, lets you see keyword trends based on geography
That last one could be especially important for local bloggers since you can see data from specific cities and regions.
Important: When doing keyword research, don’t worry about the exact numbers you’ll see; focus instead on the relative popularity and trends of certain keywords.
SEO for Blog Posts/Articles
Let’s move ahead on the assumption that you know the words you’ll want to include in your blog post, and you’re ready to start writing.
Optimizing Article Headlines
The most important on-page SEO signal is the page title, also known as the “title tag.” In Wordpress, and in other blog platforms I presume, the headline you use for your article also becomes part of the page title. The page title also becomes the large, clickable link when your content shows up in search engine results, like this
The headline of that article is “Planning A Hyperlocal Blog Strategy.” It also became the page title; thus, it also shows as the clickable link in Google (and Yahoo, Bing, etc.). It’s very important that you include your primary keyword(s) in the headline of your article, and also try to write your headline in such a way that it will catch a searcher’s eyes and make him/her want to click the link on Google.
How to Optimize Article Headlines
The default Wordpress installation will make your page title show up with the blog name first, followed by the article headline. Like this:
Blog Title : Article Headline
That’s generally not good for SEO. You want your headline to appear first in the page title. There are several Wordpress plugins that will let you change the order, such as All in One SEO Pack or SEO Title Tag (and others).
Some plugins will let you customize the page title so it says whatever you want. This can be a very handy and effective way to target multiple terms — one in your article headline and another in the page title. For example, a couple years ago on my other blog, I wrote an article that I targeted toward the phrases “reputation management” and “small business.” The article headline is Why Reputation Management Matters for Small Businesses, but I used a plugin to write a custom page title. I switched around the order of those keywords, so that the page title is “Small Business Reputation Management: Why It Matters.” And here’s how it looks in Google’s search results:
As you can see, I targeted two versions of the primary keyword — one with the visible article headline and the other with a custom page title. This is an effective way to optimize your posts to target similar keywords.
Optimizing Article URLs
The URL is another signal that search engines use to learn what a page/article is about. Google has written about the benefits of short URLs. Search engines and humans both prefer shorter URLs over really long ones with a lot of hyphens and words. Wordpress makes it easy to optimize your URLs before publishing:
Just click that “Edit” button and you’ll be able to rewrite the URL however you want. My advice is to eliminate as many unnecessary words as possible and leave the primary keywords, like I did in that reputation management post I mentioned above. See how the URL (in green) consists only of the primary keywords:
You should do the same with your hyperlocal blog posts.
Meta Tags
You can ignore the keywords meta tag completely. No search engine uses it. But you may want to spend some time on the meta description tag; it doesn’t have any impact on rankings, but it may show up as the snippet of text below your listing on a search results page. A good snippet can encourage searchers to click through and visit your blog.
But the description tag won’t always be used as the snippet — it depends on the search query and other factors. In the reputation management example above, you’ll notice that I did write a custom meta description tag, but I don’t do that with all my posts. I’m often happy to let Google pull some text from the article itself to show as the snippet.
If you use Wordpress, there are a variety of plugins that will let you write custom meta description tags.
Optimizing the Post (e.g., Keyword Density)
The first rule of writing blog articles should always be to focus on writing for humans. Your copy has to be readable and understandable. At the same time, you should include keywords in the article to help search engines understand what you’re writing about. But you don’t want to overdo this. There’s no such thing as a perfect keyword density. Don’t worry about counting how many times you use a certain keyword. Instead, read your post aloud before you publish — you should be able to tell if you’ve overdone it or not. Mention your keywords but don’t overdo it.
Optimizing Images
A striking image can help your articles succeed on social networks; people regularly share content that includes a unique or interesting photo. But images can also help with SEO. Here are a couple quick tips related to using images in your blog posts:
- Use the keyword in the file name of your image, like main-keyword.jpg.
- Use the keyword in the ALT text of the image, but don’t overdo it.
- If your blog template supports captions, use the keyword in the caption of your image. If not, it helps to have the keywords appear in close proximity to your image — again, without spamming/overdoing it.
Internal Linking
I’ve explained already that the anchor text of links are a strong SEO signal, and this includes internal links — these are links on your blog that point to other pages/articles on your blog. For example, when I link to my old article with the phrase legal resources for bloggers, it helps that article rank for the keyword phrase I used in the link — the anchor text.
Use internal links (to your old blog posts) generously, but don’t overdo it. No one likes to read an article where every third word is a link back to some old article. Do it when it makes sense for your readers, but use keywords in the anchor text of those internal links to help search engines associate the old article(s) with the correct keywords.
Summary & Preview
Chances are that you won’t care about SEO with every post/article you write. But when you do, it’s important to make sure you’re using the right keywords and that you’ve optimized your post headline and the page title. You can also optimize the post URL, images, internal links, and the other things listed above to help with SEO.
Optimizing individual blog posts is just the beginning, though. There are a variety of things you can do to further optimize your blog for long-term trust and authority. In the next article, I’ll share some ideas for ongoing blog SEO. Look for that article next week.
In the meantime, if you have comments or questions about this article or the series so far, the comments are open.
(This was the third of a five-part series about SEO for hyperlocal blogs/web sites. Future editions will be published on the next two Mondays.)
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