SEO Blogger Tutorial: How to optimize individual blog posts

Hello and welcome back!

In the last tutorial, Learning the Basics with Blogger SEO Part 1, I wrote about the importance of blog descriptions, privacy settings, meta description and page descriptions.

This tutorial is about optimizing your individual posts.

Before I begin though, you need to have an understanding of long-tail keywords. These are 3-4 word phrases that are VERY specific to your post.

These are the phrases that potential readers of your blog are likely using to search for the information you are offering. For that reason, it’s important that you include one or two long-tail keywords in every post.  The longer, and more specific your keywords are, the easier it will be to rank for that particular term.

Your conversion rates should also be higher, meaning that if a reader finds your blog while searching for something very specific and they find it on your blog, then they’re much more likely to follow you and/or buy your product (if you happen to have one).

Here are the areas to concentrate on:

1. POST TITLES

• Include your keywords in your title and remember to start with them. Why? Because search engines give much more weight to the first few words in a title. An example is: “Back To School: Books for First Grade Students”
• Use colons when you have two keyword phrases as I do in the example above.
• Numbered Lists seem to generate more click-throughs. I hardly ever use them, but they’re very popular and generally eye-catching. Example, “10 Easy Art Lessons for Kids” or “25 Ways to Use Play Dough”. You get the idea:)
• The SitsGirls have more good ideas about post titles here.

2. WRITING YOUR POST

• Include keywords near the beginning of your post, and then a couple more times further in. But be careful not to overdo it because that makes Google cranky and they may penalize you for over-optimizing. As long as your post reads naturally and doesn’t feel forced, you’re good to go.
• Use subheadings in your posts. Apparently this isn’t as important as it used to be, but supposedly Google is still happier when you include subheadings. It helps the search engines figure out exactly what your post is about. You can see how I’ve used them in this post.
• Share your posts through social networks. The more external links you have leading back to your blog post the better!
• Link back to previous posts that relate to your current post. This is called internal linking and it’s not only super helpful to your reader, but also for improving your SEO. Here’s what kissmetrics has to say:

 Content links are a strong signal to both the search engine and the user that the content you’re linking to is really good. Readers want that. Thus, internal linking is helping the reader. But you’re also helping your SEO.

3. SEARCH DESCRIPTION

• Write a search description for each and every blog post. As you’re typing your post just look over to the right and you’ll see a list with Labels, Schedule, Permalink etc. Near the bottom is “Search Description”. Click on it and write a succinct description (think summary) of your post. If you don’t take the time to do this, then Google will just write a random summary for you. If you write it yourself, then YOU get to decide which snippets of information will show up in search results. (Please note: You need to enable Search Preferences and write your description under Meta Tags before this option shows up. You can find more info here.)

4. IMAGES

• Be sure to give your images proper names. Search engines won’t know what to make of an image entitled 634224.jpg. It doesn’t know you’ve just posted a super cute pic of your furry four-legged friend. But if you name it something like “cute-golden-cocker-spaniel-mix.png” then everyone’s clear. It’s also best to name the image in lower case with hyphens.

• Alt tags are also super important! After loading your image into your post (but before publishing) be sure to click on the image and then “properties”.  Two text fields will pop up.