Blog Posting Tips For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s been a while since I posted in my series about blogging for money, the holidays kind of got me sidetracked. But I’m back and want to finish up the series, there are just a few more posts after this one.

I have to be honest here, I don’t always follow the tips I’m going to provide in this post. I tend to write for my readers rather than for the search engines. That decision will be yours to make but my take is that if you write for your readers, the search engines will soon find you. That being said, if you want to blog for money, search engine optimization and following these tips will get you indexed and ranked much quicker.

When you researched your niche, if you were following the advice I gave in my post, Finding A Good Niche For Making Money Blogging, you probably did some keyword research. This research will now come into play. You will want to start by posting for your long tail (multiple word) phrases first.

Make each post include a single phrase only and use that keyword in the title of your post.

Example:

Let’s say your keyword is “red silk duvet cover”. In your post use that keyword phase along with “silk duvet cover” and “duvet cover”. This post will be about all three but specifically about the “red silk duvet cover”. Make the title of your post start with your longtail keyword phrase, so in this example, it will start with “red silk duvet cover”.

The next item you’ll need to pay attention to will be the title tag. If you followed my instructions in the Setting Up Your Blog Properly Series, it is set to use the title of the post in both your URL and as the title tag. That is the default when using the All-In-One-SEO plug-in.

The problem is that you have two parties you are trying to satisfy; your reader and the search engines. All-In-One-SEO will allow you to give each what they want.

Now if we go back to our example, let’s say your post title “Red Silk Duvet Cover For A Sensual Bed.” Both the reader and the search engines are satisfied as your keyword is the first thing in your title.

But…

If you had a title of “Five Things You Must Look For In A Red Silk Duvet Cover” you have a problem with the search engines. The keyword you want to rank for starts at word eight of the title and the search engines won’t put much weight on it in that position of the title.

However, if you want to get your post read, you must make it as compelling as possible and “Five Things You Must Look For In A Red Silk Duvet Cover” is as compelling as you can get.

The solution is to use the All in One SEO Pack. After you type your post, scroll down to the All-In-One-SEO on your posting page and add a new title -

Here you can change your title to “Red Silk Duvet Cover – 5 Things You Must Look For”.

Now the search engine has the keyword you want to rank for in the beginning and your reader will still have a compelling title that will lead them to read the article.

In testing on other blogs, I have moved a post from page 3 or 4 of Google to page 1 for a specific keyword just by changing the title tag, so this is an important component for search engine optimization. When blogging for money, traffic is essential and you will get more traffic the higher your post ranks in the search engines.

Finally, the order that you post will definitely make a difference in how fast your blog ranks.  It is much easier to rank for very long-tail keywords phrases such as those with four or more words than those that are only two word phrases.  Once you are ranking for those four words phrases, you will eventually start to rank for the primary keyword phrases that bring in even more traffic.

The next post in the ‘Blogging For Money’ series will be tips for finding and writing great content.

Ciao!

Reba

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Setting-Up Your Blog Properly – Part 2

As stated in Part 1, after installing your WordPress blog on your own domain, there are 3 steps you need to take to get your blog set-up properly so it will not only be indexed by the search engines but also be easy to run and a good place for your visitors to go. I’m going to cover each step in a separate post, this is Part 2.

These steps are specific to a WordPress blog hosted on your own domain. The free or hosted services like Blogger and WordPress.com will not allow you to accomplish what is described in these articles. These are the three steps:

1. Part 1 – Add the proper plug-ins
2. Part 2 – Change the permalinks
3. Part 3 – Find a quality theme and activate the widgets

Changing Permalinks

The default setting in WordPress sets the URL of each blog post as Yourdomain.com/?p=123. If you allow your URLs to look like this, you are missing a chance to add your keywords into the URL. Having your keywords in your URL can help your post get ranked in the search engines much quicker. This can easily be corrected.

After you log-in to your blog, click on Settings – and then Permalinks. You will see the following:

Click Custom Structure and enter /%category%/%postname%

This will make the URLS for your blog posts appear in the following format:

“Yourdomain.com/category(your keyword)/postname

If you’re reading this post from its own page (not the home page or the blog page), you can look at the URL in your browser’s address field and see it’s formatted as described – http://www.internetmarketingboomer.com/hot-topics/setting-up-your-blog-properly–part-2/

This is an important step to take in making sure your blog is set-up to be indexed by the search engines and listed with the proper keywords.

My next post will cover finding a quality theme and activating widgets on your blog.

Cheers!

Reba

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