Blogging Best Practices from an SEO perspective

It’s important to remember that we blog for many reasons, not just for SEO. The following best practices are only regarding the Search Engine Optimization reasons for blogging. You may need to weigh these against other reasons you may have for blogging such as user interaction, conversion, etc.

Choose One Keyphrase

Each blog post should be targeting one main keyphrase. Use tools such as the Google keyword tool or Wordtracker’s free keyword service to determine the target keyphrase.

Use the Keyphrase as the Title

Title your blog post with the keyphrase and only the keyphrase. If you need additional information, use a sub-head. The title will be read by Google, and will also become the article’s url, two important factors in determining relevance.

Create and Use Relevant Categories

Your blog should be set up to include the category of a post in the url. Creating and using a relevant category will boost the relevancy of a post. Categories should be fairly broad, as you want many posts under each category. Example of a relevant categories would be “Auto Loans”, “Auto Finance”, etc. Each post should only exist under one category.

Pay Attention to Keyphrase Placement

1. Begin the article with the keyphrase if possible. If not, then make sure to include the keyphrase in the first sentence
2. Use sub-heads that use the keyphrase or a subset of the keyphrase
3. Use keyphrase or subset of the keyphrase once per paragraph as a general rule
4. Bold the first instance of the keyphrase
5. Link one instance of the keyphrase to a relevant page on your website
6. Read over article to make sure keyphrase placement isn’t so high as to sound “spammy”

Create and Follow a Linking Strategy

Your should determine the top 5-10 keyphrases that your site addresses and naturally work those links into your blog posts. Each of these phrases should have a consistent landing page. Go easy, these need to look natural and should be relevant to the blog topic. Remember, you are linking naturally, so you’re not saying “for great auto loans click here”. An example would be “I remember when my mom was looking for an (link to home page)auto loan(end link) with a low interest rate.”

Create Unique Meta Information

Each post should have unique meta description and meta keywords tags. We suggest a 50/50 rule: 50% of meta information should be pre-existing material related to the website in general, 50% should be specific to the post. Be sure to begin with specific information and work down to pre-existing information.

Create Unique Tags

As with the meta information, the first half of tags should be unique to the post, second half should be general tags developed for the site.

Submit Blog Posts to Digg

Submit each blog post to Digg. As with the blog post, the title of the Digg should be the keyphase. If more words are necessary to prevent looking like spam, then begin the Digg with the keyphrase. Include the keyphrase in the description of the Digg.

Submit Digg to Google

Submit each Digg to Google’s Add Url page (go ahead and also submit the blog post while you’re there). Again, use the keyphrase as the title of the submission.

Create Companion Press Release

If publishing a companion press release, target a keyphrase that is addressed in the blog as well as on the website, link to both the blog and the web page from the press release with relevant text.

Good luck with your SEO blog post!