7 Basic SEO Tips For Your Blog

Keywords

Keywords is vital to your blog – in the URL, title, content and even in your images. That’s why it’s important to be conscious when placing keywords into your blog.

Conduct research, if you can. What type of keywords work well for your blog.

You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?

Content

Your content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.

“The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are full of oft-updated, useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline,” MarketingVox explains.

One way to ensure that your site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog. “Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless!” the Search Engine Journal suggests. An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.

Link back to yourself

There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site — it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages, SEO Consult says.

You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content. MarketingVox advises that you also make the anchor text search-engine-friendly: “The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.”

As with all other SEO approaches, be sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into excessive linking — you don’t want your visitors to get annoyed.

Monitor where you stand

You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings. MarketingVox suggests that you keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar.

It’s also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they’re using to find your site, according to PC World.

Image descriptions

Spiders can only search text, not text in your images — which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible.

Start with your image names: adding an “ALT” tag allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site. Perfect Optimization explains an easy way to do this.

The visible text around your images is valuable for SEO: MarketPosition suggests adding captions to all your pictures and being descriptive with the text in immediate physical proximity to your images.

Social media distribution

A CEO blog is just one element of social media distribution, an important SEO strategy according to SEO Consult. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.

Whether displayed on your company’s account, or recommended, re-tweeted, and re-distributed by someone else, this strategy exponentially muliplies the number of places where visitors will view your links.

Link to others

An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites.

PC World suggests that you personally ask the webmasters of well-respected sites if they’ll include a link to your site on theirs. Be sure to return the favor — then everyone wins!

Make certain that your partner has a good web-reputation, of course. MarketingVox warns against getting tied to a “link farm” whose bad SEO habits could bring you down.

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