Blog posts tend to become very old very quickly.
The reason for this is most bloggers only share and promote their new content on the day they publish it.
Your subscribers and social media followers may read your posts within a few days of you hitting the publish button.
After that, you’ll find the traffic to that post decrease substantially until you’re only getting a few views a day, if that.
So whats the solution?
Search Engine Traffic
The great thing about the search engines is the traffic comes in consistantly regardless of how old your posts are.
The amount of traffic depends on how high up the rankings your content is displayed in the search results.
This is called SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)
The better you optimize each post, the better chance you have of gaining a higher ranking and more regular free traffic.
In this basic tutorial, we’ll look at all the little things you can do to make sure you have optimized your posts properly.
Post Title
This is the single most important element of each blog post.
Add Descriptive Post Title With Focus Keyword
Each post should contain content focused on one keyword or key phrase.
Click here to learn more about the importance of keywords.
Use keyword tools to find idea’s and the most relevant keywords & phrases for your post title.
Your post title should describe the overall topic of your content, so keep it relevant.
Post Content
Your post content needs to be focused on your readers challenges, frustrations, needs & goals.
Creating content which is relevant, useful & unique will help your readers solve problems and rank your posts higher in the SERPS.
Your readers will click through to your site from the SERPS at a higher rate and stay longer reading your content if it contains the solutions they need.
Image Optimization
Whenever you add images to your post content, always add a description which relates to the text around the image.
Also add Alternative text which is read by the search engines and is shown if the image fails to display.
You can also add text as a caption which is displayed below the image in a frame and you can even add a html link in the caption field.
Here’s more i wrote earlier about image SEO.
Anchor Text Links
Whenever you insert a link in a post, be sure to add a descriptive title to the page you are linking to.
Try and use keywords and phrases which are related to the text and content around the link you are inserting.
The words around your link or the words which are linked (anchor text) should be descriptive of the content your readers will see when they click through using the link.
Example: The linked words are image SEO and the page which is linked contains content all about optimizing images.
Optimized Sub Headings
You’ll notice under the Paragraph drop down in your editor that you can choose from different heading sizes.
Considering the fact post titles use the Heading 1 tag, you should use sub Heading 2 & Heading 3 within your content area.
These are called, h1, h2, h3 and so on.
Another tip is to use words and phrases which describe the content below each sub heading and which are also related to your post title.
The bigger the sub heading size, the shorter the length of the sub heading and the higher the importance and focus.
Meta Descriptions
You’ll find a field below your editor for inserting a meta description.
Here’s a post i wrote earlier about the best practices for creating effective meta descriptions.
Short Focus Keyword Permalink
You’ll notice below your post title there’s a permalink.
Whenever you add a post title, the permalink will be created using the words from your title.
You can change this BEFORE you publish your post so it includes your main focus keyword or key phrase and remove any words which aren’t relevant.
You can see from the example above i have removed most words and simply left the main focus keywords.
This post is not about creating a post, its about optimizing your posts content so its search friendly.
SEO Penalties
The search engines are constantly changing the way they rank web pages.
They are striving to display the best quality website pages at the top of the rankings and punish sites for a variety of reasons.
Be careful not to over optimize your sites content by:
- Using exactly the same anchor text in links.
- Stuffing posts with unnatural amount of keywords.
Here’s an excellent checklist of some of the questions Google use when assessing the quality of a websites content.
Anything you don’t understand or disagree with?
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