How to Optimise Your Blog Posts

It's fairly common knowledge that having a regularly updated blog on your site will help bring traffic to your site. But there's a surprising lack of proper blog optimisation. Put your blog ahead of the crowd with our handy guide.

Title

Your title should perform three functions:

Tell search engines what the post is about. Tell people what the post is about. Make people want to read the post.

The first means putting a keyword into your title, if possible at the start. The second is self-explanatory. The third means giving it a catchy spin or even manufacturing some controversy. 'All my blog readers are ugly' is bound to get some clicks.

Topic

Choose your topics carefully. You will almost certainly gain traffic through your blog, so make sure it's the traffic you want. There are three main ways of optimising topic choice:

Choose topics based around keywords you're already optimising for. Take a look at your analytics. Keep an eye on trending topics in your niche.

When looking at your analytics, you're looking to see what people are interested in that you haven't already covered. This could either mean you're getting a small number of visitors for 'dog toys' (which you sell) so you write a blog post about these, or that your dog toys page is getting a large amount of traffic, which you could increase by writing a related post.

Content

Just as with the rest of your website, keyword density is important to consider. Once you've written your post, use a text analysis tool to tell you which words it picks up as keywords. If they're not the words you want, go back to your post and change it until they are.

By doing this, you're maximising the SEO benefit you get directly from publishing the post itself.

Technical

One of the most common mistakes is in not setting up SEO friendly URLs. There are countless blogs where the URL is along the lines of www.mywickedblog.com/posts/?p=1285. URLs are one of the key indicators to search engines of what the post is about. Make sure it comes up instead as www.mywickedblog.com/posts/my-wicked-blog-post.

Otherwise, make sure you have unique meta-data for every page (title tags and descriptions) and all images have alt tags, just as with the rest of your website.

Blog posts aren't just about great content - you need to optimise them for maximum exposure online.