Blogs are natural SEO powerhouses, ranking highly in all of the major search engines, but even the best SEO tools need some help. After all, even Tiger Woods has to practice his drives and putts.
Blog SEO is no different. If you want higher search engine rankings in Google, MSN, and Yahoo Search, it's important to remember your blog themes and topics. Fortunately, it's what you post about on a daily basis.
Your blog visitor traffic grows from searches for information about your blog's major topics. If your blog is about dogs, then your posts are most likely to be on that subject. The same holds true for blogs about football, law, politics, or knitting. Your blog is seen by the search engines as themed for those topics. Since you already have wide coverage on those topics, it's time to narrow the focus into some sub-categories.
Let's say that you are writing a blog about dogs. To rank highly for the numerous canine related topics, it's necessary to write about them. As I always tell my clients, you can't rank well for blueberry muffins if you don't talk about them at all. For your hypothetical dog blog, let's widen the search engine traffic net.
Today, you decide to write about feeding dogs. The best place to begin is with a post about dog food, water, dishes, times, and so on. Once you have written the post, you will notice that the column contains many animal related keyword phrases. All of those terms will be included in the search engine rankings. The trick is to have them rank highly. The first page would be nice.
After the post is written, it needs a title. Note that I suggest writing the post first. Some bloggers write the title first. Some create it last. For strong SEO for your blog, we'll develop a title last. It's often easier that way and less work is not a bad thing for a blogger.
Your dog related post contains a discussion of how to select dog food appropriate for your pet. The discussion continues with how and when to feed the animal. It would appear that you've just written the classic how to article. They are always popular with readers, and they get searched for frequently. You have struck a winner. The question now is how to turn the post into SEO gold.
You can write the title two ways:
How to feed your healthy dog
Dog food: Selection and feeding
Note that the first title style is straight forward. The second title places a keyword phrase at the important front end, and expands on the topic after a colon. Both title styles are effective for blog SEO. I suggest you try using both styles on your blog. Note that this post uses the keyword phrase colon phrase format.
You can even use a catchy turn of phrase, but if strong SEO is your goal, make sure the funny line contains the keywords for the post as well. A sense of difficulty always makes for a fun challenge, but handle comedy with care. Not everyone can pull it off successfully, and your search engine placements could falter as a result.
Think about your blog post titles, and write them to match the posting content. The combination of a title that says what the post is about, and then actually writing the material, makes for a powerful SEO combination. It's also not hard to do and requires no additional work on your part.
Higher search engine rankings, and no added effort. Now that's something to blog about!
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