Optimizing Your Blog Post in 7 Steps for Better Search Engine Results

When creating a post or article, there is a delicate balance between writing for our readers and writing for search engines. In the end we want to have the reader gain useful information from our article, stick around for a while, and ultimately return. However, we must also be cognizant or aware, that in order for people to find our blog articles, search engines must be able to index and categorize our posts. The best advice I can give is to write first for your reader, then for the search engines. Here are a few basic steps for optimizing a blog post. 

Blog Post Optimization - Step by Step

Step 1 - List Your Keywords
Every article or post should have a theme. Think about what you are writing and organize your article into main points. After you have done so your first step is to make a list of keywords to be used in your post. For example, a few keywords for this article could be optimizing your blog, posting to your blog, seo, etc. For those more advanced do keyword research and use tools such as keyword elite, seo for firefox to help come up with good keywords and variations. I will discuss keyword research in much more detail in a later article.

Step 2 - Create keyword variations
Once you have your keywords, come up with variations of your keywords. For example, instead of optimizing your blog, you could also say blog optimization, and instead of saying blog post, you can say blog article. These keywords, and variations should be used in your articles. What you want to avoid is the same keyword used over and over again. Search engines will see that as spammy, and your readers will get quickly bored and hard to read.

Step 3 - Use your keyword in your Title. The title of your post is one of the most important things search engines and people look at. You want to make people want to read your article, and you want to tell the search engines what your article is about. Technical FYI: for people who are a bit technical, many blogs will put the title in the meta title tag of the HTML code that is generated for your page.

Step 4 - If your blog software has an option to enter a summary, optional excerpt, or meta description for the post you are creating, take advantage of this and create a short summary. Make sure you include one of your main keywords and/or a variation you came up with in step 2 above. Technical FYI: I use wordpress and have installed the Sem Pro Theme. Sem Pro helps optimize your blog by allowing meta descriptions to be entered when you are creating a post. If you don't have an option similar to this continue to the next step.

Step 5 - Make use of header tags when you can. These are HTML H1, H2, H3 etc tags. Most WYSIWYG editors have the option to create these tags. This is not only beneficial to your readers but search engines as well. This of these header tags as sub-headings in your article. For example, if your article is on St Patricks Day Recipes, you could break up your post, and use a header tag for each recipe, one for Shamrock Cookies, another for Green Magical Cookies and finally one for a Shamrock Shake. Since my blogging software automatically makes the title as an H1 TAG, I like to use H2, H3 and H4 for my sub-headers.

Now if your post editor does not have the option for header tags, I will show you how to easily do them in a future video tutorial as long as your editor lets you view html source. If you are not techie don't worry, I have shown people who have no knowledge or desire to learn html to do some of these simple necessitiess.

Step 6 - Bolding, highlighting or italicizing important keywords. It is rumored that google is starting to pay attention to words that are bolded, highlighted or italicized in order to help categorize posts. While preference is still given to what we previously discussed, I would say this makes sense. After all, if you think about it, google wants to provide relevant results. With the onslaught of bloggers and people less technical hitting the internet, many people don't pay much attention to what we have been talking about, because many people don't have an understanding of search engine optimization and the importance of title tags, descriptions, etc. However, it is natural for people to highlight important words and easy to do with a nice WYSIWYG editor. So, it makes sense that google is starting to pay more attention to this, and it does not take much to incorporate bolding important words or headings into your articles. Just don't overdue it, google is great for picking up spam.

Step 7 - Tagging your articles. Ah, tagging articles, how can I explain this? Over the past few years many new search engines have popped up that categorize blogs, such as Technorati. There are also new types of sites called Social Bookmarking Sites. These social bookmarking sites are intended for people searching the internet to bookmark (just like you do in a browser with your favorites in IE) a site, and create your own categories. One can then view these categories and pull up articles by those categories. This is called tagging. Tagging is an important concept to learn for bloggers, along with Social Bookmarking, both of which I talk about in more detail in later articles. My goal is to give you a general feeling for what  tagging is.

The newer versions of wordpress and Semiologic Pro allows you to create tags for your articles. If you have this option in your blogging software I highly recommend taking advantage of tagging. They will help sites such as Technorati, Google Blogsearch, Digg, and Propeller, properly categorize your posts. If you have older versions of wordpress check out the wordpress plugin call Ultimate Tag Warrior which makes tagging as easy as writing a word. Ultimate Tag Warrior will do the rest. The goal is to bring more relevant visits to your site.

Summary: Don't overdue these seven steps. The last thing you want is spammy looking article. Good SEO and rich content wittenfor your reader can be a delicate balance. When you are done with your article, ask yourself, how readable is it? If it is not easily readable and understandable they you know you have overdone the steps mentioned above.

I hope this helped a little. A couple products that might help is Semiologic Pro for wordpress, and Sean Wu's Tag and Ping to help understand tagging and social bookmarking better.