Top 20 SEO Tips and Tricks for Bloggers

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique to convert your ordinary one into SEO Optimized blog. With SEO optimized blog, you will surely perform better on across all search engines. In today’s post, I’m going to mention 20 SEO tips and tricks that you should follow and implement on your blog to make it Search Engine friendly. And when you have gone through all of 20 seo tips, don’t forget to mention the tips that you already are deploying on your blog and also mention the tips you will be adding on your blog in the coming days to make your blog more SEO friendly in the comments section at the end of this post.

1. SEO Optimized Blog Address

When you are choosing address for your blog whether you are creating it on self-hosting or free blogs should consist of main keywords in your niche as part of your blog address.

2. Proper Title and Description

Once you have chosen an SEO optimized address for your blog, next step will be creating keyword rich and sensible title and description for your blog. It’s you blog title and description, which is shown in search engine as your listing with your blog URL. So people will mostly decide whether to click on your blog listing or not, after going through your blog title and description.

3. Must have About Page

Make sure your blog has a working About page. Lots of bloggers have an empty About Page, which leaves a bad impression to their blog readers. So you should have an active About Page and should contain important in formations like what this blog is all about, people behind this blog and all.

4. Study your Competitors Blog

Make a list of top 15-20 competitors blogs in your niche and analyze what they are doing to get into top rankings into search engines. You should closely monitor how frequently they are updating their blog, their activities on social networks, what kind of content they are putting on their own and other blogs and websites in your niche. You should also monitor what they are doing to get quality links for promoting their blog pages.

5. SEO Optimized Themes

You are making search on Internet while selecting a theme or template for your blog, make sure you chose a SEO Optimized blog theme. Theme that you select for your blog whether its a free or paid, should load faster, compatible with all major browsers and has valid W3C-Compliant Code.

6. Permalink Structure

Make sure you chose a seo optimized URL structure for your blog posts. Avoid using blog post urls like http://www.scopeformoney.com/?p=24 and try to include your main keywords into your blog post url. Also avoid using unnecessary directories like day, month, year etc as part of your blog URL. An SEO Optimized URL should look like http://www.scopeformoney.com/top-20-seo-tips-and-tricks-for-bloggers. You can think of using category name as part of your blog post address.

7. Create Sitemaps for your blog

You should create HTML and XML sitemaps for your blog. We use Sitemaps for faster crawling of our blog content. So it will be beneficial to submit your XML sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster tool once you have created it. If you don’t know how to create XML sitemap for your blog, there are lots of website that can do it for you free of cost. So just goggle for create XML sitemap. And if you are running a WordPress blog, there are some plugin that will create XML sitemap of your blog automatically.

8. Using Alt text for all images

Don’t forget to include alt text with all images that you use as part of your blog posts. And when creating names for your image, use SEO optimized names for your image and if possible use small size images to make your blog loading speed faster as page loan speed is also one of ranking factor on Google these days. So it is beneficial from seo prospective using small size, seo optimized named images with proper alt text when using on your blog.

9. Using Breadcrumbs navigation

Its great to have Breadcrumbs implemented on your blog as that would help you in promoting your blog in search engines and also good from your blog readers experience. You will surely get some plugin if you want to implement Breadcrumbs navigation into your WordPress blog. And if you have doubts about Breadcrumbs navigation, please refer to this page from Wikipedia

10. Use headings and other styles in your blog posts

I would recommend using heading tags and other tags like bold, strong, italic, ordered list, unordered list etc to make your blog content impressive and search engine friendly.

11. Social media links/icons integration

Don’t forget to include links and icons promoting your blog readers to submit their favorite posts from your blog on social networks where they are active. This way you will be able to get some traffic, buzz and valuable links from social networks for your blog. Some of popular social media networks worth mentioning on your blog are Facebook Share, Twitter Retweet, Digg it, Delicious Save, StumbleUpon share etc.

12. Use Pinging websites

It is advised to notify all pinging websites about the publication of new content on your blog. With this, search engine bots will be able to know the appearance of new content on your blog and thus will help in faster crawling of your content. Lots of blog engines like WordPress will send notification of all major pinging websites automatically. So you should not worry much about Pinging if you are using WordPress blogging engine on your blog. You can use Ping-O-Matic website to notify search engines about the latest update on your blog manually.

13. Using Robots.txt file

I would recommend using this file to block search engine access to certain directories. You can think of blocking certain directories in your blog as a mean to avoid duplication of content within blog and as additional security and privacy measure.

14. Interlink your blog posts

It is an ideal approach to interlink your blog posts where they look natural. You will be able to get some valuable links for your important blog posts by doing the interlinking process on regular basis. There are some plugin available if you are running a WordPress blog, which will help you add some related posts towards the end of current post. With some blogging engines like blogger.com, you have to do it manually.

15. Doing guest blogging

Create a list of blogs in your niche that accept guest posts and start communicating with those bloggers. Once some of bloggers allow you for guest blogging, start sending your quality guest posts to them. This way, you will be able to get targeted links and traffic for your blog. You will enjoy higher page rank and better search engine rankings when you have achieved links from top blogs in your niche.

16. Links within blogroll

It is advised to create a big list of blogs in your niche and contact them showing your intend for link exchange in blogroll. But before doing this practice, I would suggest build some reputation for your blog. No one would love to do any kind of partnership with new blogs. So you will surely get lots of bloggers interested in exchanging links with you once you have got certain level of authority in your niche.

17. Links within Content

Although links within also helps in search engine rankings, but you will get maximum benefit when gets contextual links from other blogs and websites in your niche. So you can think of approaching some blogs for exchange of links with each other blog posts.

18. Allow others to guest blog

As we know content is king when you talk about getting higher rankings in search engines. So it is advisable to allow content coming on your blog from all means. One of medium by which you can get additional content on your blog is giving your blog readers the facility to write quality guest posts on your blog. 

19. Link out to other blogs

It is a good habit to link out to other blogs in your niche wherever they make sense. It looks spammy when we link out to our own websites in your blog posts. So it is good from seo prospective to link out to other website and blog pages within your blog posts as that will help you build a stronger outbound linking profile for your blog.

20. Being active on Social networks

It’s a good practice to be active on all major social networks. You should aim at creating an active presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

These were the 20 tips I find worth mentioning here. Are you a SEO expert and have something more to add, please share in the comments section below. Keep on reading my blog for more valuable seo tips and blog tips.