Your blog is a powerful tool. can help build your brand and your audience, establish thought leadership, drive leads, and build relationships with other bloggers.
Blogging is also a powerful SEO tactic. From an SEO perspective, publishing blog content on a regular basis helps you:
- Show up in more search results for a wider range of queries/keyword searches;
- Attract more links: Inbound links raise the "SEO value" of your website;
- Attract social signals: "Share signals," such as Facebook Likes, Tweets, and Google pluses, indicate the popularity of a document to search engines, and they can boost rankings.
Despite their SEO value, many blogs aren't optimized well and therefore aren't reaching their full potential to help drive organic search traffic from the Web. Let's take a look at six valuable tactics for improving your blog's SEO.
SEO Blog Tactic #1: Add Related Posts
One of the critical aspects of SEO is making your content easy to find. Google and other search engines gather information by crawling the Web and basically "clicking on links" on your website to discover content. If Google is unable to find certain pages of content on your website, that content will not show up in search results, rendering those pages useless from a SEO perspective.
One way to make blog content easier to find is to add a list of related posts at the end of each article. This tactic also helps send authority signals and the all-important "link juice" to content across your website. And when it comes to SEO, links -- and the value or "juice" they pass -- are key factors to helping pages rank higher in the search results.
If you run your website on Wordpress, adding related posts is relatively easy, and there are a range of some very good related post plugins. You can see one in action at the end of this post about the best Texas assisted living facilities.
SEO Blog Tactic #2: Add Previous and Next Posts
Similar to related posts, you can increase discoverability with "previous" and "next" post links, which can appear at the top or at the bottom of an article on your blog. See this example from subject matter experts, Zintro, on a post about vitamin-enhanced water.
Much like adding related posts, previous and next post links help search engines find your content and better circulate the flow of link juice throughout your blog. In addition, they help increase page views and time on site, and they boost overall user-engagement, which Google is clearly tracking as a ranking signal given the recent Panda update.
SEO Blog Tactic #3: Use Pagination
Pagination is a system for numbering pages on your blog that helps you organize, segment, and archive older content. Pagination is particularly helpful for usability because housing all your blog posts on a single page that scrolls endlessly is not a very practical or user-friendly experience.
When it comes to SEO, pagination done properly makes your content easier for search engines to find by reducing the number of clicks needed to reach deeper, archived blog content. In addition, proper pagination helps you maximize your "crawl budget," which is cap on how many pages of your website Google and other search engines will visit before they leave.
A solid example of SEO-friendly pagination can be seen on this news website. If you scroll to the bottom of the home page, you'll notice numbered pages that are in fact hyperlinks to older posts. This type of pagination, with multiple hyperlinks, means fewer clicks to reach older content.
In contrast, an example of poor pagination (or complete lack of) is evident on many blogs that use free Wordpress templates where the only method of accessing deep content is a single link at the bottom of the home page that says "older entries." You can see a good example of poor or no pagination on this news blog.
Why the above example bad? Having only a single link buries much of your blog's archived content and can make it difficult if not impossible for search engines to find. Yet by incorporating multiple, hyperlinked, numbered pages, you bring buried content back to the surface.
SEO Blog Tactic #4: Use Categories
Using categories on your blog is another effective SEO tactic. Categories are yet another tactic for helping users and search engines find your content. In addition, having a list of categories in your side bar template helps flow link equity to deeper content (another important SEO tactic I've mentioned). You can see categories in action on this blog:
Categories also help to classify and silo content into topically themed pages which creates additional opportunities to rank in search results for those category pages. If you want to give your categories an additional SEO boost, try adding introductory content to category pages which helps make your category page content "unique."
SEO Blog Tactic #5: Vary Title Tags vs. Article Titles
Keywords are an integral part of SEO. Most bloggers understand this and often work to include keywords and keyword variations within their content. But where many bloggers often drop the ball is not varying the title of the blog post and the title tag. Most bloggers either just fill out the blog post title field in their CMS, which then defaults as the title tag, or they duplicate the title and the title tag with copy and paste.
There are a number of SEO plugins that allow you to vary title and title tag, but my favorite is Headspace 2, which is a great all-in-one SEO plugin for Wordpress and shown in the screenshot above.
Why will varying title and title tag improve your blog's SEO? The title tag is the most important piece of content in SEO, while the title of the blog post is a close second. Duplicating these fields with the same exact text is a missed opportunity. To capitalize on SEO here, you should vary the title tag vs the title and use different keywords. The more keyword variations in your content, the more opportunities your content has to rank in more searches.
For example, with this article, the title is "Six Ways to Improve Your Blog's SEO." To help it rank for additional keywords, I could vary the title tag to read "SEO Blogging: How to Optimize Your Blog for Better SEO." Doing that gives the article a chance to rank not only for "ways to improve your blog's SEO," but with a varied title tag it could also rank for "SEO blogging," "how to optimize your blog," "better SEO for your blog" and a range of other keyword combinations.
SEO Blog Tactic #6: Add Social Sharing Buttons
The last tactic I'm going to touch on is incorporating social sharing on your blog. Many bloggers include a "follow us on...." Twitter and Facebook icons on their blogs, but following is different from sharing. Adding social sharing buttons lets your audience share and recommend your content to their circle of friends, which improves content distribution across social networking sites.
From an SEO perspective, sharing content via social media increases the likelihood of mentions and links (which drive rankings). What's more, Google is measuring social sharing signals as part of its ranking algorithms to help determine popularity, trust and authority of Web content.
Sharebar is currently my favorite social sharing plugin for Wordpress and you can see it on this blog for music fans.
I like Sharebar for two reasons. It moves along with the reader as they scroll down the page content and it contains "share counts," like number of Tweets and Google pluses, which further reinforces trust and authority of an article.
