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Tip: Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Posts to Increase Your Readership
September 18th, 2008 | Posted in Blogging |
When you search-engine-optimize your blog posts, you can increase your blog’s subscribers in a long-term way. You don’t have to stiffen your prose to apply search engine optimization — you just have to apply keywords in the right places.
For example, my post on “Technical Writing Careers — Answering 13 Questions About Technical Writing Jobs” targeted searches for “technical writing careers.”
My post on “How I Create Video Tutorials” targeted searches for “create video tutorials.”
I don’t always search-engine-optimize my posts, but when I do, the post has a lot more hits. Ideally, I should search-engine-optimize all my posts.
I think we underestimate the importance of search engine optimization. I’d even say that SEO is one of the most important techniques for writing blog posts. For example, today I received an email from someone who wrote,
I found your website while searching “podcast” and “Technical Writing”.
I was invisible to this reader until he found me in the search engines. Sure you have your regular readers who occasionally look at your RSS feed and visit your site. But 75% of the time, your visitors come from people searching for specific keywords using search engines. If you search-engine-optimize your blog posts, many more people will find you. Your readership will steadily increase. Neglect SEO and your posts only live until they pass from your blog’s home page.
Right now, I have 1436 subscribers — about 100 more subscribers than attendees at the last STC annual conference. Of course I’ve been blogging for two and a half years, and I have close to 500 posts. But I know applying the right keywords to my posts in a search-engine-optimized way has helped me attract as many readers as I have.
One plugin that helps is the WordPress All in One SEO pack plugin. It allows me to create a search-engine-optimized title for Google, and a different title for my readers.
In addition to that SEO plugin, I try to add the keywords as the first words in my title, as the first words in my first paragraph, and then mention the keywords about 6 times throughout the first 3 paragraphs. That’s it.
Of course figuring out what the right keywords are (using a tool like Wordtracker) is another task, which I usually skip. It takes too long. I usually just ask myself how I would search for the topic and use that phrase.
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Tags: keywords, search engine optimization, SEO, seo keywords
September 18th, 2008 at 9:06 am
I’ve noticed that TypePad lets you do the same thing… sort of. If you fill in the title for your blog post first, it will use those words for your permalink. If you leave the title blank and you start on your text first, it will take the first few words from the text and use them for the permalink. And when you fill in your title and change the text in the post, the permalink will not change. So, I’m thinking that you could start a blog post with the words
“technical writing tutorial” Or whatever. Then, save the draft. Then, reopen it, change the text and give it a reader friendly title!
I love Wordtracker but Google has a similar tool that’s free. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Some things about it are not as good as Wordtracker and some things are better. At least, that was the case the last time I used it which was probably about a year ago.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Hey, look! I just left your blog to go to my friend Kristie’s blog and read her most recent post and look at the comment from “James”. http://slacker-moms-r-us.com/2008/09/dream-on.html#comment-12454
Natashas last blog post..I’m going to die today.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Hey Tom - great post! Thanks for the tips!
Theresa
Theresas last blog post..Social Media that I Love
September 18th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Good tips. I always forget things like that when making posts but it totally makes sense. I think I’ll be more cognizant of the title and lines in the first paragraph when I make my articles from now on.
Chris Pines last blog post..Smokin’ Aces Screen Captures Added
September 18th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Wordpress is a great blogging platform and getting it search engine optimized really isn’t a hard task. Using proper permalinks and robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content and a few other methods can really make a difference. The All in One SEO plugin is really the best bet.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Wow, these are great tips! I still feel so in the dark when it comes to SEO and this post really helped me see some light. Thanks so much.
Kates last blog post..Day 5 in Erin’s Kitchen
September 19th, 2008 at 12:22 am
@ Natasha, thanks for pointing me to the Google Adwords tool. I’ve used that before and it works well.
Re the permalink trick you described, actually, the link of your post doesn’t play that large a role in search engine optimization. The All in One SEO plugin does much more. If you search for “create video tutorials, and then click my post, you’ll notice that the title Google sees/shows is completely different from my actual post’s title. Click the link in the search results and compare the titles. That’s a much more powerful technique than just altering the permalink (but the permalink does factor in, but just a little).
I don’t know if Typepad has a similar feature.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:29 am
that’s good thing about SEO, it keeps going smarter and smarter. like me i found your site typing a good keyword from google. thanks and more power.
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