7 ways to improve a blog’s SEO

Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007 at 1:29pm in Blogging, Media, PR General  | 

UPDATE: I’m now number one in Google for the search term ‘improve a blog’s SEO‘.

UPDATE 2: I’m now number one in Google for the search term ‘search engine optimisation and PR‘

UPDATE 3: I’m now number one in Google for the search term ‘PR and search engine optimisation‘ and 6th for ‘PR and search engine optimization’ (US).

It seems that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a subject often overlooked by the online PR community judging by the lack of discussion it generates. Let’s be honest, it’s not being talked about much. In fact, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that if ain’t being talked about by the more tech savvy PR people then it’s not being used a lot in the entire industry. Admittedly I’m no SEO expert, by a long shot, but the more I read up on it the more I believe it to be quite a fine art. It’s quite complex and, like PR, requires knowledge gained through experience. SEO is one of those things that take time and (cliche alert) is more a marathon than a sprint.

As of writing this post, 30% of my traffic in the past week has come from organic referrals (organic meaning through search engines). I think that’s quite a lot and I’m pretty pleased with it. Nearly 20% of traffic is ‘direct’. Direct meaning people typing your URL directly into their browser’s address bar or having it already saved in their bookmarks. Which is even better as your URL, which tends to be part of a blog’s brand, is implanted in people’s minds which, again, isn’t bad if you enjoy this type of thing like me.

Here I’ll list 7 ways to improve your blog’s SEO. This is really top line stuff and is meant to be nothing more than that. Think of it as a beginner’s guide… Ahem, that beginner being me.

1. Write unique content

Or as I’ve heard Steve Rubel say “bake fresh bread”. It’s a bit of a no brainer I know and it’s been said by many a blogger. But, depending on how far you want to go with this, it can really take some time. If you’re writing about a particular subject and there’s a whole load of other people writing about the same thing, try and find an area which hasn’t been covered yet. As an example, SEO and PR. If you do write something unique, insightful and compelling then there’s a chance that you’ll receive a decent number of inbound links your way which will be referenced time and again. Thus, that particular post will be ranked high in Google (or any other reputable search engine) for its related keywords. And remember, because you’ve chosen a particular area that isn’t discussed all that often, the chances of it featuring well in the search rankings are high.

2. Choose the title of your posts carefully

The title of this blog is 7 ways to improve a blog’s SEO which, I would say, is a perfect title to describe the content. It is what it is. Post titles are held in high regard by search engines as they usually describe what the content is about. See a post I wrote about Innocent Drinks a couple of months ago near top spot in Google. But as well as making the title relevant to the content, which makes sense to do, I also carried out a little Google keyword research prior to see how many other people are using that particular phrase. There are none. Take a look. And if I break down the title to ‘improve a blog’s SEO‘ which is a pretty decent search term and one that you’d imagine would generate quite a few search queries you’ll see that only one search result appears. So in short, once this blog posts gets indexed in the search engines it’s between us two who gets top spot for improve a blog’s SEO. Frankly, I’ll settle for second.

P.S. You may have noticed I used the phrase ‘improve a blog’s SEO’ more than once in that last paragraph. Apparently if you want to feature in a search engine for a specific phrase it pays to mention it a few times in your content.

3. Place keywords/key phrases within your post content

If you do a specific search on ’search engine optimization and PR’ (US spelling) you’ll notice there are over 6,000 results in Google. Do the same using the English spelling - search engine optimisation and PR - and you’ll see only eight results generated. I don’t know about you but I’m English/British so I would always use the latter. Which, again, is better for me as the competition isn’t as tough. Obviously the downside is that people only who use only the (real!) English spelling of the word ‘optimisation’ will find it. Which I can live with. I’m British and the majority of my traffic comes from the UK anyway.

If I change the phrases around to - PR and search engine optimisation - you’ll see UK PR blogger, Antony Mayfield is top spot for that one and further down the ranks you’ll see the popular UK blog by e-consultancy. This is probably a tougher one to crack as both of those are high ranking blogs. However, if I do the same search using the US spelling - PR and search engine optimization - you’ll see that, compared with using search engine optimization and PR, the competition isn’t as bad. So who knows, I may feature well for both the UK and the US versions. We’ll see.

4. Link to content that’s relevant to your blog’s subject area

This is an interesting one. Did you know that a link from my blog to, say, Simon Collister’s blog would hold more weight than if I linked to something totally unrelated to PR? Search engines are aware of ‘Topical Communities’. I.e. Sites/blogs that contain the same subject content which interlink with one another and referencing one another’s work. So it’s more valuable to have links from blogs that are more related to your own blog’s subject area than from those that have little to do with it.

5. Make hyperlinks relevant

I’m guilty of it myself but how many times have you seen linking done like this:

I’m using Paull Young’s blog as a guinea pig. You can read it here.

This isn’t good because a search engine reads the anchor text (the text in the link that’s visible) and associates it with the link. So in this case I’m associating Paull’s blog with the word ‘here’. Which isn’t a good association whatsoever. What I should be writing is something like this:

I’m using Paull Young’s blog as a guinea pig.

Here the anchor text used is a lot more associated and therefor more relevant to the page (Paull’s blog) I’m linking to.

You can take this a step further by introducing the ‘title attribute’ in links too:

Stephen Davies

It just looks like any ordinary link but if you scroll your mouse over it you’ll see some additional text popping up. This text tells the search engine that not only my name ‘Stephen Davies’ is associated with my URL (www.prblogger.com) but also ‘The best blog ever’ too. Adding the title attribute looks like this:

Ordinary link:
< a href="http://www.prblogger.com/">Stephen Davies

Rel attribute added:
< a href="http://www.prblogger.com" title="The best blog ever">Stephen Davies

How scalable this actually is when you’re pushed for time and writing multiple blog posts a day I don’t know? Maybe someone could build a WordPress plugin for it.

6. Make your permalink URLs descriptive

If a person can tell what your post is about just by reading the URL then you’re onto a winner. So, for example, this post’s URL reads:

‘http://www.prblogger.com/7-ways-to-improve-a-blogs-seo’

Which isn’t too hard to tell what the content is. Search engines can read permalinks which will go toward improving your chances of being found. Much better than, say, if it read like this ‘http://www.prblogger.com/?p=97′. Plus if you follow point 2 you’ll also have your keywords in there too.

P.S. Apparently it’s better to have the words in your permalink url to be separated by hyphens (-) and not too many subcategories. E.g:

http://www.prblogger.com/blog/tutuorials/7-ways-to-improve-your-blogs-seo

7. Get links from the big boys

Why do people link bait with the influential bloggers? Yes it’s to drive more traffic and maybe gain extra subscribers, but a link from blog/website that a search engines deem popular holds a lot more weight than one that’s less popular when calculating PageRank. It would be great to get a link from Hugh MacLeod, I know he’s been giving links away lately.

Receiving a link from a site like the BBC, Guardian or New York Times and you’re laughing. Which reminds me of this post I made on online news and how some people in the industry still don’t think an online hit is of any worth. If you’re promoting something like a client website then I’d much rather have it in the online version of, say, the Guardian than the print version.

As mentioned, this is just basic stuff. I haven’t taken in to consideration other elements such as design, CSS validation, usability and navigation. I’m sure other people can add to it or indeed criticise it.

Go for it.

technorati tags: SEO, SEO and PR

Related Posts

• List of mobile news sites 04.21.
• Internet primary news source in five years 06.04.
• List of UK PR student bloggers 03.13.
• Don't Panic Guide to social media 04.14.
• New social network for marketing professionals 09.25.

• Next post: « ITV Digital Conference - panel transcript
• Previous post: Youngie goes to New York »