Blogging Series Part II: Rockin’ the Blog SEO

Christine from Oatmealinmybowl.com

Tips for Search Engine Optimization

It’s part two of my Best Blogging Practices blogging series and this week we’re going to rock that SEO!

There’s a ton that you can do to boost your blog’s search engine rankings, I mean, seriously, we all want to be on Google’s first page don’t we?

While I can’t guarantee that you will be, one of the speakers at the Fitness and Health Blogger’s Conference, Christine from Oatmeal in My Bowl,  gets a boatload of visitors to one of her websites and not even by posting new content, but by having keyword rich posts on all the content that’s already there.

So there is hope for us all!

Here are seven great blogging SEO tips from Christine that made me want to retreat immediately to my hotel room to get working on them.

1. Pay attention to your heading tags, h1 & h2.

The “h1″ tag is the blog post title. Fill that up with key words. The other area to pay attention to is the “h2″ tag, which is a headline within your post. Go into the HTML editor (instead of the visual editor) and write a keyword rich headline that’s different from the name of your blog post. See my headline in bold up top? (“Tips for Search Engine Optimization.”)

In the HTML section, it’s written like this: <h2> Tips for Search Engine Optimization</h2>

Easy peasy, right? WordPress automatically changed it to the style of a header and made it bold. Search engines pay attention to these and you should too. By the way, you can single out even more sections if you want, with keyword rich titles. h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, keep going!

2. Change the permalink to something keyword rich. This gives you a little more freedom with your blog’s title. In WordPress, your blog post title becomes the permalink, but in the post editing area, you can actually change it to more key words. My blog post is: “Blogging Series Part II: Rockin the Blog SEO” (a little more creative) but my permalink is: “tips-for-blog-seo.” See?

3. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find out how people are searching for the topic you’re writing about.  It’s a free tool, go to it, plug in your topic and it shows you specific orders of the words and the popularity of them so you can use that combination in your post and in your titles and tags. The more accurate your keyword order, the more Google will pull that up for you in other people’s searches.

4. Be as specific as possible. Don’t bog down your search terms with lots of words in between them. If you’re writing about having a mad science party, you’d have better luck by saying, “we wanted to plan a mad science party” as opposed to “we had a party and we decided to go with mad science.” Because “plan a mad science party” is more specific. Or instead of “I did kettlebells for a half hour and these were my exercises,” you can say “I did a 30 minute kettlebell workout which included…”

5. If you link to another blogger’s article for reference, it’s nice to use keywords for their hyperlink. Pay it forward! I really love this one. Thanks Christine for giving us all these great seo tips.

6. Add the Meta Description plugin to your WordPress blog. This is a funny story actually. I try to optimize my own site using keywords and it works pretty well. I also use the plugin the “All in One SEO pack,” where I add the description of my post and tag it using key words.

However, I also added the Meta Description plugin some time ago, but for months left it blank. I heard it was great, but for what?! How do I use this thing? So, thank goodness Christine saved me because now I know how to use it! I’m not afraid to tell you how lost these things sometimes make me. Anyway, in this plugin, you use, again, a keyword description, and this description is what comes up in the Google search for someone, so that when your post comes up, they know exactly what they’re getting from your blog post. Hurrah! It also gives you a place to add some more keywords for tags. I wanted to run back to my hotel to fix this immediately. I am still fixing up my past posts.

7. Stop linking to words like “it” and “here.” This one I’ve known for a while and I see it all the time.

Offender: For more intense cross fit workouts, click here. 

Correct: Click the link to find more intense cross fit workouts.

While we’re at it, anytime you can change out the word “it” to a group of keywords, do that! Instead of “I did it yesterday” say “I did my 30 minute cardio tabata workout yesterday” (cardio tabata was Christine’s example). Don’t go crazy though, make sure it sounds as natural as possible throughout your post. Everything is about balance. You don’t want to fill it up too much and make it look like a “keyword” post. But you want to be smart about it so that the search engines will pick you up and find you new readers.

Disclosure: Thanks to Refuel with Chocolate Milk for sponsoring my trip to #FHBC12 and to Christine at Oatmealinmybowl.com for the great tips. 

Missed the first part in the series?

Here’s the Anatomy of a Blog Post which is about how to craft a blog post that speaks to people.

Have more SEO tips? Please leave them in the comments! 

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