Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about having your website pages ranked highly in the search engine results pages for your targeted keywords or keyword phrases so that people looking for your products or services can find your website in order to buy them. 

In the ‘early days’ your SEO strategy  would involve little more than adding the right keywords to your meta-tags and that was about it.  These days to rank highly in the search engines you need to put a bit more effort into it! 

Effective SEO now needs to include web usability issues, visitor conversion tactics, a quality link-building strategy to name just a few of the considerations.  Most SEO experts, including Google’s own engineers, believe that a blog is an excellent channel for helping businesses with all aspects of SEO. 

The primary objective is to make your blog easy to understand for both human beings and the search engine robots.  To achieve this you need to get three things absolutely right: 

• Have clear navigation and create links to both your website and your other blog posts.

• Make your primary keywords prominent in your blog posts and blog post titles

• Keep your pages as text pages, don’t overload blog posts with images as this slows down the load speed considerably. 

Having checked that these three basics are in order you now need to familiarise yourself with some of the SEO terms and know what to do: 

1. Title Tag <title>

The title of each blog post is very important. Not only should it grab your readers’ attention and encourage them to read the full post, it should contain the primary keyword or keyword phrase that is the subject of the post.  Why is this so important? 

• Your Title Tags are displayed in the search results (this is the linked part of Google search engine listing, or your ‘Ad’ heading if you like)

• Title Tags are used by search bots to “interpret” what the page content is 

Title Tags are very important, so what do you need to know? 

• All your title tags throughout your blog (and your website come to that) should be unique – avoid repetition

• Ideally your Title tags should contain no more than 70 characters (including spaces)

• Title tags should be relevant to the post content and contain your primary keyword or keyword phrase for the post topic.  

2. Meta keywords & Meta Descriptions 

Google have openly said that they no longer take into account at all any Keyword meta tags in their ranking algorithm – there is no guarantee however that this will always be the case so why not include them anyway. 

The Meta – Description however is important. This is the text that appears immediately below the heading of your Google search result entry (known as the search snippet) and as such it needs to be attention grabbing and focused.  Ideally your meta Description should contain three things:

• Your Primary keyword / keyword phrase
• A WIIFM (what’s in it for me) for the reader and, mostimportantly
• a call to action.  

If your blog has been developed using the WordPress platform, the  “All-In-One SEO Pack” is probably the easiest-to-use and the most reliable SEO plugin available and it will help you create meta descriptions for all pages of your blog. 

Tomorrow we will continue this series of posts with part seven which will be the second half of this post about creating search engine friendly blog posts.  

If you would like more information about how blogging could help your business please leave a message below or visit WSI IMS – WSI Internet Marketing Services for UK Businesses.