How To Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
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With so many blogs competing for readers, a blogger’s main concern is how to create a blog that is attractive and engaging. Empower Network supplies everything from professionally designed themes to nifty design tools that make organizing your content very easy and to create a great-looking blog. Here are a few design tips to get you on your way to creating a widely read blog
Write Descriptive Post Titles
This is the most important thing you can do to optimize your blog for search engines and drive more traffic. Imagine what you might type into Google to find your post and include it in the title of your blog post. Clear descriptive titles aren’tnecessarily clever or fun but they will get more people to your blog.
Use Image Titles That Match Content In Your Post
Title images with one or more words from your post title increase the “relevance” of your post and helps your blog index better against that term.
Use SEO Keywords In Your Content
If you include the key terms from your image and title in the body of your post, especially early in a post, you will have a greater chance of coming up higher in the search engine rankings. Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool is a great little nifty tool to find effective keywords.
Post Regularly
The more often you update your blog, the more often your pages are indexed by the search engines and the higher your ranking climbs. That is why blogs are inherently more search-engine friendly than websites. Most websites aren’t updated for weeks, if not months, whereas many bloggers post new content on a regular basis.
Link To Other Quality Related Content
There are many reasons to link to other sites or posts on the web and optimizing your blog for search is one of them. When you link to quality sites or articles on the web that are relevant to the content of your post you increase your chances of a higher ranking. Simply linking to articles or sites that aren’t related to your post topic does not help.
Generate Inbound Links
An inbound link is a link from another blog or website that points to yours. If that blog or website is highly viewed, the link is “counted” more heavily and your search engine ranking rises as a result. Inbound links are not directly in your control as someone else has to link to you. That said, if you build goodwill within the blogging community and write consistently good content, chances are good that you’ll begin to generate inbound links.
Submit Your Blog To The Major Search Engines
You can further get your content out to the search engines by going to Google, Yahoo! or any of your favorite search engines and type in “submit blog.” You will be directed to a page that will allow you to submit your URL for indexing.
Keep Trying Different Things And Check Your Stats
The most successful bloggers are continually trying new things – reading what works for others, investigating top-rated blogs, and staying current on the newest developments in search engine technology. There is no single way to keep your ratings high. Rather, it is a combination of all of them and a willingness to experiment that separates the most popular bloggers from the rest.
DO NOT QUIT
Since so many people launch blogs and websites and abandon them within weeks or months, part of the calculation used to rank pages is how long the site has been around. If you keep blogging, your ranking will go up if you are still posting consistently after a year, after two years and so on. The hare got off to a faster start but the turtle eventually wins the race – remember that story?
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