Fine Tuning Your Blog Post’s Search Engine Optimization

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If you’re a blogger, then your content is how you attract search engine visitors. So in order to get even more search engine traffic to your blog posts, you’re going to have to take a number of steps to fine tune and perfect their search engine optimization. And even if you aren’t a blogger, it isn’t hard to apply these steps to your own site.

Optimizing your content takes patience and effort. After all, you’re going to need to pay attention to the little details of your post that you usually would’t even think about. If you’re prepared to take extra
time during the writing of each of your posts in order to properly optimize them, great! Then we’re on the same level. If you don’t feel like taking the time to increase your search engine rankings, all right,  that’s your choice, but it’d be better if you stopped reading right now, so you can save yourself even more time.

If you’re still with me, awesome! Let’s get started with our 5-tip guide:

1. Write with on-page optimization in mind – While you should always be thinking about catering to your visitors with your blog post, you should also always keep in mind that the posts should be keyword-rich. However, you shouldn’t over do this, as this becomes very repetitive and uninteresting to readers. The point is
   that your readers want quality content, and you should give it to them, but only in a keyword-rich way so that you can benefit too, from search engine traffic.
2. Within your page title, be sure to focus mainly on SEO – your page title doesn’t have to be the same as your post title. Instead, your page title should be keyword rich and should focus mainly on search engine optimization. Usually, your post title doesn’t have these qualities. A good example of an optimized page
   title is the title of this page: “Blog Post Search Engine Optimization”. It clearly states the most important keywords of this post while still telling the user what it’s about. Still, overdoing the optimization of your page title can really screw up your entire post in the reader’s eyes. “SEO Search Engine Optimization Tips For
   SEO” is a terrible page title. If you can’t figure out why, you might want to reread this tip.
3. Use headings effectively – No blog reader has an attention span of more than a few seconds. Seriously. If your post title won’t attract readers, nothing will. But we’re not talking about post titles, we’re talking about headings. And we’re not focusing too much on readers, but more on search engines. Headings are the
   “<h1></h1>” (1-6) HTML tags, and they could easily be used to influence your search engine rankings. In the eyes of search engines, headings have a lot more importance than regular text. That’s why it’s essential for you to optimize headings in the same way that you would optimize a page title. Take note that the h1 tag, (which shouldn’t be used more than one on ANY page) has the most importance as a heading while the h6 tag has the least.
4. Bold keywords – Bolding keywords is a similar scenario to making them big headings: as a blogger seeking search engine traffic, making important keywords stand out from the rest of your content is essential to your success. After all, with blog posts having so much content that may not be so focused on keywords, search
   engines might not know what to rank you high for. Bolding keywords and making them stand out helps solve this problem so that you can increase the search engine traffic coming to your well-written blog posts.
5. Categorize – It’s always been important to properly categorize each of your blog posts. But this doesn’t just
   help visitors find what they’re looking for. It also helps you boost the search engine rankings of your content. Ever notice that when a post links to the categories it is in, they aren’t usually nofollow’ed? This doesn’t hinder your search engine rankings, it actually helps them through internal linking and link circulation. What does this mean? The more posts categorized correctly, the better overall search engine rankings of your entire blog.
6. Bonus: Remove dates – I’m not completely sure if removing all dates on the posts on my blog was the right thing to do, but there are reasons you may want to do this. If you didn’t already know, Google knows when your blog posts were published and show them on the search engine results page, as shown below:

Search Engines Like Google Know More About Your Blog Posts Than You Think

Because of the dates being shown, some searchers decide to pick the most recent posts, even if they are ranked lower. So a good reason for not putting dates on your posts is if you think your content will not be affected by time.

For example, if you write about the human body, most likely your information will be true a year from now and time should not be a factor in your search engine traffic. But in a lot of other niches, it’s a bad idea to remove dates. So it all depends on who you are and what you blog about.

Anyway if you’re planning to remove dates, you’re probably going to have to go knee-deep in code to do it. Editing your theme “single.php” file should do the trick (if you’re on WordPress), but you’ll probably
also have to edit another file for your post excerpts and to remove the dates shown there. (sorry I can’t give the name of the file, because there is no set name for it and it varies from theme to theme)

And we’re done. Your blog is a home to all kinds of content. But search engines don’t necessary know this or think of you as important enough to rank high. So in order to get the search engine traffic you deserve, you need to optimize your content. I sincerely hope the above tips just helped you with doing that.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, be sure to share and retweet to show some appreciation! Really, it only takes one click!

Karan Singhal is a blogger and professional internet marketing consultant. You can read more about his services at Trafficke. Karan shares more advice on his blog, Trafficke Blog and you can find him on Twitter @Trafficke.

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