More Tips On Blog Optimization
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 7 of July , 2007 at 8:49 am
Here are more tips to help you optimize your blog:
- Use h2 tags for subheads
- Lavish your readers will bold text
- Throw in a photo with alt text every now and then
- Don’t forget to optimize your title
Why Your Blog Needs Subheads
Yesterday we talked about keywords and links. Today we’ll add a little caveat. There’s more to blog optimization than simply optimizing your blog post. You also want to optimize the other elements of your blog. But in terms of optimizing your blog post, using subheads is a great way to add some extra Google juice.
There are two ways to optimize those subheads. The first is keywords. Use your keyword in the subhead. Readers notice, and search engines do too. Especially if you employ the second method of optimization.
H2 tags.
Make your subheads stand out by making them bigger than the rest of your text. You can do that effectively by surrounding them with h2 tags. If it is aesthetically pleasing you can even add bold tags to the subheads to make them stand out more, but in most cases just increasing the font size will make them more visible to your readers (who will scan your post before stopping to read the parts they are interested in) and the search engines, which will give you extra points for the h2 tag.
Bold Text Means More Blog Juice
Every now and then you want to add some bold text to your blog. Bold a keyword phrase, a heading or subhead, or sub-subhead (a technique I like to employ). Adding bold means that readers can see that you ascribe a certain amount of importance to that topic and they’ll slow down enough to see what that is. Search engines will also reward you more SEO points for the bold tags.
Dress Your Blog Up With Photos
A photo on your blog gives your blog posts some enhancement, just like on your website. Don’t overdo it, but add a photo from time to time to give you that extra ooomph. And be sure to add an alt tag onto it.
Alt tags are text equivalents that tell the search engines what the photo is about. Because search engines can’t crawl photos, a carefully worded description can give you a little extra SEO benefit. There’s really no evidence that alt tags affect the rankings of your photos the way they are indexed at the search engines, but I expect that to change at some point. As more and more people compete graphically there will need to be a way to ensure that photos are ranked appropriately. This will become more critical if Google Universal picks up steam and Ask 3D, already being hailed as a better innovation, gives searchers a beautiful way to search for photos, videos, websites, blogs, and whatever else may match their query.
Bottom line: Photos give your blog some aesthetic appeal but don’t use them without alt tags because the search engines will need to know what they are about. Again, use keywords in your alt tags. More Google juice. And one more point: Use a keyword that is used heavily in your text. For instance, if you are writing about bananas and you include a photo of a banana then that photo’s alt text will become more important to the search engines if it is placed next to text that also uses the keyword banana. Just a little hint about where you place your photo on the page.
Your Blog Post Title Needs Optimization Too
Now you’ve written your blog post. You’re proud of it. You stayed on topic, included a photo, wrote a perfect alt tag, threw in some subheads and bold text, now what? Write your title.
Why write the title last? Because you want to make sure you have the perfect title. Most bloggers tend to ramble when they get started. That’s fine. Blogging isn’t academic work. Stay on topic enough that your readers don’t get confused. If you write to your keywords then that will be easy. But you want to write your title last because the title should tell the reader exactly what your blog post is about in just a few short words. If you ramble too much after you’ve written your title then the title may not be about what your post is about.
Nevertheless, your keyword is important. You want it in the title, preferably near the beginning. every element of your blog post needs to have your keyword in it so that the search engines key in on that word and rank your blog post accordingly. Remember, each blog post is a separate web page. Treat it like one.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Blogging
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