8 ways to make blog content search engine friendly

Today’s post is written buy Jason Lancaster, president of Spork Marketing, a Denver internet marketing firm offering SEO consulting services.

A basic principle of search engine optimization is that while maximum effort yields maximum results, making a 20 percent effort can very often generate 80 percent of the benefits.

If you understand the basics of SEO, you’ll be ahead of 80 percent of your blogging competitors, which means you’re going to do quite nicely in terms of earning free traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Here are the SEO basics you need to know:
1. Target an audience. 

If you create a blog or blog post for a wide, poorly defined audience, your SEO efforts will fail. Instead, focus on a specific group. Don’t just target moms, target moms who want to learn more about raising twins. Don’t just target teachers, target teachers who need ideas for lesson plans. This way, your content will address a specific set of questions that your audience has, and that specific focus will in turn generate search traffic.

Remember: Most Google or Bing searches are made by people trying to find the answer to a question. If you write blog content that is helpful to answering that question, SEO is a great tool for getting traffic and building an audience.

2. Use descriptive and direct titles.

 In the days of print, clever titles were the best way for an article to get noticed. Today, when content is a mouse click away, clever titles usually hurt your blog. If a searcher can’t figure out what your blog post is about from the title they see on a Google search results page, they won’t click on your search result. Be direct and include your keyword(s) in your titles.

3. Make content easy to skim. 

One of the golden rules of the web is that no one reads content – at least not at first. Very few people visit a web page and just start reading, especially if they’re a first-time visitor or a search-engine user looking for specific info. Instead, these people scan the page. Make sure the information they’re looking for is present, and then they’ll start reading.

To make this happen, your content should be easy to scan. Write shorter paragraphs. Use subtitles, bullet or numbered lists, bold text, and italics to draw attention to the important parts of your post. Use captions on your photos, etc. Make it easy for someone to get the gist of what you’re writing about in 5 to 10 seconds.

4. Use images and videos. 

Images and videos are “sticky,” meaning people spend more time on a page with a picture or video than they do on a page with nothing but text. Therefore, use images and videos in your posts. Be sure to include captions on images and videos. Fill out the “alt” tag description for your photos with a three to seven-word description of the image.

5. Forget the words “keyword density.”

It’s been years since a popular North American search engines paid any attention to the number of times a keyword appears on a page (a.k.a. keyword density). When writing web content, your only job is to write something awesome. Don’t worry about how many times you use a specific keyword, it won’t help you rank.

As a matter of fact, using keywords unnaturally – what’s known as keyword stuffing – will hurt your site’s search rankings. Forget all about keyword density. It doesn’t matter.

6. Optimize HTML title tags every time you blog.

If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry. Just read well-known SEO expert Jill Whalen to get up to speed. Once you’ve read how to edit your posts’ HTML title tag, do it. The HTML title tag is the most important tag on a page. If you create a good HTML title, you will get more blog traffic. Guaranteed.

7. Use internal linking.

Every post you publish should include a link to at least one other post on your blog. This is an SEO best practice because:

• You get more pageviews – Pageviews can drive revenue of course, but they also boost your connection with a first-time visitor and increase the likelihood they’ll return.
• You help Google and Bing find all your posts – Google and Bing use incredibly sophisticated bots to index the web, but they aren’t perfect. At times they will completely miss a post. By linking from one post to another, you help make sure search engine bots find every one.

8. Don’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable.

Some bloggers I talk to don’t like the idea of writing boring headlines, creating content that’s scannable, or using photos in every post. For many of them, the SEO best practices I’ve laid out above feel unnatural – almost as if they’ve stopped being creative and started being commercial.

Let me be the first SEO expert to tell you that it’s OK to ignore every one of these tips. There are plenty of popular blogs that don’t follow any of these rules, proving that it is possible to be a successful blogger without worrying about SEO.

However, you should know that Google and Bing aren’t rewarding sites that follow these practices arbitrarily. Google and Bing have both found that sites that follow the rules I’ve outlined offer a better user experience. In other words, SEO tips really aren’t SEO tips at all – they’re tips for making your site easier to use. In that light, I think they deserve serious consideration. Making your blog more user friendly isn’t a bad thing.

Do you have SEO content questions? If so, feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

[This is post is written by Spork Marketing, a sponsor of the 2012 WordCount Blogathon. Spork Marketing is providing products to be given away during the June 1 blogathon raffle.]