Search engine optimization has always been an important part of internet marketing, regardless of the type of business you are involved in on the net. This applies to bloggers as well. In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize your blogs for Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If you have yet to set up a blog, I would recommend using WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS) because it is highly customizable and also easily set up for search engine indexing.
The first tip as a Blogger is that you should allow search engine bots to crawl your blog. This may sound obvious, but you might be surprised that there are some bloggers who accidentally block bots without knowing it and keep wondering why there are no search engine referrals over time. If you are using WordPress, go to your privacy settings in the admin panel and enable the setting that allows Google and Yahoo to crawl and index your blog.
Once you have allowed robots to visit your blog, the next thing is to create a search engine friendly URL structure. This can be easily done by going to your admin panel once again and customizing your Permalinks to display the name of your post. Alternatively, you can also select one of the standardized settings: the Name and Day setting or the Name and Month setting. This setting will change your normal numeric URL to the keyword-rich URL that search engines prefer.
The third tip is to have a very descriptive title for all your posts. Before Google considers ranking your page, it will analyze what your page is about based on the title you have created for your blog. Therefore, you need to have a unique and descriptive title so that people can find your blog using search engines.
The last tip is to optimize your images on your blog. You’d be surprised if I told you that a good percentage of my traffic actually comes from image.google.com! This is because I constantly optimize all my images on my blog and search engines only refer people to my blog when they search for a particular image using search engines. There are several ways to optimize your blog images, one way is to have a very relevant file name for your image. Whenever you upload an image, remember to name it using relevant keywords. Do not use generic IDs that are generated by cameras. You can also optimize your images by using relevant ALT tags for them. It’s important that all your images have an ALT tag because this is what search engines look for whenever they want to rank images. ALT tags can be created when you upload the image through WordPress.
If you practiced all of the above tips on your blog, you will start to see an increase in traffic in the coming months. I wish you all the best on your blog!
