Saturday, October 4, 2008

Effective SEO Strategies For Writing Blog Posts


Your main goal for running a blog is to make money, and for the long term success of your blog you need to concentrate on getting as many high ranking blog posts in the search engines as you can.

To start out with your blog will not have very many backlinks or page rank to help escalate your posts into high ranking positions. The main task is to target keyword phrases which have little or no competition in the search engines. One main drawback is that these keywords are unlikely to attract very much traffic, and so you have to focus on writing posts which target many various keyword phrases.

The single most important search engine optimization tip to use when you are writing a blog post is to choose a primary keyword phrase and then add as many related words and phrases as possible.

Keyword density is not something you should worry about. Rather than stuffing your blog post with your chosen primary keyword phrase, you should use words which have the same meaning (also known as synonyms) and add related type phrases (or secondary keyword phrases). The days of creating a single blog post for each keyword phrase are gone.

You can use the WordTracker free trial to find keywords which you have researched (i.e. they are searched for regularly, but have little or no competition). Once you have identified useable keywords, use the Google Keyword tool to find related type phrases which Google relates with your main keywords. Enter your main keyword into the "Enter one keyword or phrase per line: " text box. Make sure the "Use synonyms" check box is ticked and then click "Get keyword ideas".

The Google Keywords tool will then show a list of keywords that it thinks are similar to your main keyword. Save these keywords in either a text format or as a .csv file which you can open using a spreadsheet like Excel. Go through each keyword phrase and delete those that have no relevance to the blog post you intend to write.

When you write your blog post you need to include as many of these related keywords as you possibly can, but make sure your post has a logical flow to it and your included phrases makes sense to the reader. You should write post for your readers first - make your post informative and a breeze to read.

Include your primary keyword phrase in your blog post title, but make sure the post content closely resembles your chosen title. You should also include your primary keyword phrase once or twice in the blog post content, and include the other related phrases you have settled on, for example, if your main keyword phrase is "increase website traffic" and the Google Keywords tool returned these related phrases below:

-improve website ranking
-top website traffic
-get website traffic
-targeted website traffic
-guaranteed website traffic
-your website traffic

Here is how you could use them in your blog post title:

Dramatically Increase Website Traffic and Improve Website Ranking with These Top Website Traffic Tips

In your post you would refererence all the keyword phrases once or twice and back them up with even more related phrases, for example: website traffic -> website hits -> unique hits -> site traffic. Don't keep repeating the exact same phrase over and over in your blog post content.

If you have written other blog posts which also targeted some of the similar secondary phrases, link to them using the secondary keyword phrase as the anchor link text. Linking to related themed posts benefits your blog readers because they can find more info, but it also gives your posts a SEO boost from the internal "in context" linking.

One very important point to keep in mind is that 30% to 40% of all search engine searches are one time long tail phrases which the search engines do not have any matching results to display. The actual results shown will be the pages which the search engines deem are the closest match. When writing your blog posts take this into consideration and make as many variations as you can of the keyword phrases you are targeting.

Pay close attention to your blog post slug as WordPress uses this to create a file name for each post. Make sure the primary keyword phrase is near the start of the slug. By default, WordPress uses the blog post title as the post slug, but it removes the apostrophes, quotation marks, and other characters.

For example, using the title in the "increase website traffic" example, WordPress would automatically name the blog post slug:

dramatically-increase-website-traffic-and-improve-website-ranking-with-these -top-website-traffic-tips

To write a new blog post slug, simply rewrite it with hyphens between each word, for example:

increase-website-traffic-improve-ranking-top-promotion-tips

Make sure you change your blog post slug BEFORE you publish the blog post, and don't include unneeded words like a, the, but, my, with etc. Changing your blog post slug after you have published it may cause problems with the posts permalinks and result in a 404 File Not Found error.

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