Search Engine Optimization Tutorials: On Page SEO For A Blog

On page SEO is one of the most important topics that search engine optimization tutorials could cover. Search engines will decide what your blog is about by looking at the way that that it is laid out and how you write the posts.

Keywords

Good use of keywords is a vital part of search engine optimization tutorials. Most webmasters with a knowledge of marketing on the internet will do some keyword research before even beginning to write a new article or blog post. This means using a tool like the free Google Adwords keyword tool to discover how many people were searching for your subject last month and what words they typed into the Google search box when they were looking. The words that people type into a search box are then used as keywords to base the article around.

So for example if you are writing a post about how your daughter won a prize for her Halloween costume, and you want this page of your site to be found in the search engines to attract new visitors, you might use the keyword 'best Halloween costume'.

The keyword is a term that people are likely to search for on the internet. You can use keyword research using free or paid tools to discover keywords. The free Google keyword tool is popular.

Then you would make sure that the keyword appears in the title of your post. It is best if it is at the beginning of the title. You will also want it to appear several times in the text (but not so often that it looks spammy - once per 50-150 words is good).

This just means considering keywords when you are writing, so for example you might title your article 'Best Halloween costume: Rachel wins a prize', instead of 'Rachel wins a prize for her costume at Halloween' which does not contain any keywords that people are likely to search for.

Site Layout

At this point in our search engine optimization tutorials we need to look at the layout of your blog.

Search engines are becoming smarter and more complex, but it still seems likely that they will attach more importance to the first things that they encounter on your site. What the search engine bot sees first when it visits your site is not necessarily what the human eye sees first, so you might want to look at the code for your site using View and Source in your browser, to check how it appears.

Generally, however, the bots will see what is at the top left of your site first. If your site splits into columns at any point, they will read down the whole of the left column before they start reading the middle or right column.

This means that if you have a blog with a sidebar on the left, the whole of the sidebar will be read before the actual content of the page. If your sidebar is on the right, it's the other way around. Which is better? It might depend on your site, but I guess the bots might like to find the unique content first (i.e. the post), rather than the sidebar content which is identical on all of your pages. So I prefer my sidebar to be on the right.

Images

Search engine bots cannot 'read' images. They do not know what is in a photo unless they are told in words. So if you have photos or other images on your blog, you can leverage them in your SEO efforts by adding one or two keywords in the ALT text inside the HTML tag for the image, like this:



The ALT text also appears to visitors instead of the photo if they have their browser set to not show images. Blind people who have the contents of web pages read out to them by special software will hear the ALT description of the image. So it is nice for these visitors if the ALT text gives a good description, but keep it short.

With a blog, you have no control over meta data unless you are using WordPress on your own hosting and make use of a plugin such as All In One SEO. Nevertheless, there is a lot you can do to optimize your site. Using search engine optimization tutorials like this one can help attract many more visitors to your site.


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