Optimizing your blog for Google search is crucial to your blog’s success. To get your blog before a wide enough audience to ensure that success, you need page-one placement on Google ranking. Here are five tips top experts agree will give you a leg up in your climb to top-placement in Google search results:
1. Use appropriate keywords—and use them appropriately.
Keyword research can help you improve your Google ranking. It can also help searchers locate your content. One way to find out what phrases people are using to search for your content is to do your own test Google search. As you begin typing in the search terms that are relevant to your blog, you’ll notice various auto-fill suggestions come up. These suggestions indicate the search strings people are actually using to search for content related to yours. Use these phrases as your keywords. You can also use tools such as the Google AdWords keyword tool to find keywords relevant to your blog.
Remember to write your content for people, though, and not for search engines. And never keyword stuff. Google is growing ever more sophisticated and will penalize you for these indiscretions.
2. Use descriptive titles for posts and images, and match your keywords.
While clever titles with double meanings may sound creative, they aren’t very search-engine friendly. Try to be as literal as possible in titling your posts, and use matching keywords in post and image titles, as well as in the posts themselves. When all three match, keyword relevance grows.
3. Attract high-quality backlinks.
Some ways to do this:
- Guest post on high-authority blogs in your niche and include a link back to your blog in your bio.
- Leave substantive comments on well-respected blogs that haven’t made their links no-follow.
- Add high-quality blogs to your blog roll. If your blog is also high-quality, many bloggers will reciprocate without even being asked. But, ask if you must.
- Post articles to the free article sites, linking them back to your blog.
4. Use internal linking—and use it wisely.
Link to other relevant posts on your blog. Internal linking can be valuable to your blog’s SEO, but only if the linked-to posts are relevant to the content to which they’re linked. Google’s recent updates have given link relevance even greater importance than before. Here are a few other tips to follow when linking internally:
- Make sure the anchor text of the link is also relevant to the linked-to content.
- Always avoid anchor text such as, “here,” “there,” “Click here,” or other similar nondescript phrasing. Such anchor text adds no value or relevance to your links. Always use specific, relevant wording instead.
- Never use a link-shortening service such as bit.ly to create links for your blog, and never use URLs that consist only of numbers. Using descriptive URLs is another way to increase link relevance.
- Understand that the reason internal links to other relevant blog posts benefit your site’s SEO is because they are deep links. Deep links (links to specific pages on a website) are generally more valuable than links to the main domain.
- Don’t be excessive. It’s neither necessary nor preferable to create a link every time a keyword appears in your post. Like any other SEO tactic, internal linking can be overdone, leading Google to assess a penalty.
5. Update your blog frequently.
Google ranking spiders crawl websites that update frequently more often than they do those that update less frequently. That’s why blogs are typically more search-engine friendly than static websites. The more frequently you post, the more opportunities you’ll have to move higher in search results, as more and more of your content is indexed by Google. Always remember that Google pays far more attention to websites that consistently post fresh content.
The more visible you’d like your blog to be, the more important the above five tips will be to your SEO strategy.
About:
Guest post contributed by Peter Nevis, on behalf of Orange Line Online Marketing. Peter contributes to various websites, he’s a marketing expert and enjoys writing articles about SEO & online marketing strategies.
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