Blog with SEO Intent

I blog at Talk21, the national blog of CENTURY 21 Canada - posting at least 3 blogs each week for the past year. And as busy as I get, I always take the time to add SEO-friendly components to each post that goes up.

SEO-friendly blogging includes:

• Keywords in the headline (e.g. “Wind Energy” if that is what the post is about). You’d be surprised the number of blog posts I see that have a headline that does not relate at all to the content of the blog post!

• Suitable “anchor text” - aka the words that are hyperlinked in the blog post’s content. If you are linking to a page about alternative renewable energies, the anchor text for that link should read: “alternative renewable energies.” Logical - yes! And logic what Google-bots understand best. But not everyone gets that; hence the nasty proliferation of “click here” as anchor text.

• An image in every post - and that can be a photo, or illustration or graph, embedded video, etc. Not only will it catch the eye of readers and keep them engaged, images are another chance to add keyword-rich metadata behind the post. In our techie world, it’s known as “alt-tag” for images, and it’s simple as pie to add using today’s blog open-source software (such as WordPress used behind my own blog here).

• Tags: You should add tags to every blog post - no limit to the number of tags, as long as they are very relevant to the post’s content. So to use that example above, “renewable energy” “energy alternatives” “energy efficiency” etc.

• Add each blog post to only ONE category. (You should set up categories to group together related posts; see my Category list in the right-hand navigation rail on this page.) If you add a post to more than 1 category, the Google-bots could consider that ‘content duplication’ and slap you down for it, i.e. drop your page ranking or worse (de-index… gasp!)

• If you have the ability in your blog dashboard to write your own Title Tag, be sure to do so using the keywords that pertain to that post.

Doing these best practices every time you put a blog post up will stand you in very good stead and you should care - that is, if you’d like your blog posts to appear on page 1 of the search results served up by Google and the other major search engines!