seo for blogsOver the past 11 years, I have seen a lot of things come and go on the Internet, from programming scripts to website layouts to technology changes. Although there are many things that have gotten more complex and harder to comprehend, learning online is one of those things that has thankfully gotten easier and easier as time passes.

SEO for blogs and optimizing your blog posts to use strong keywords in the title, tags and text of posts is something that may seem daunting at first. But I assure you that nothing is further from the truth. In just a few minutes and with a free keyword tool, you can easily get a better understanding of just what words you should be using in your post title, tags and even the post itself to help it attract more attention via search engines.

This isn’t a step you need to take every time you write a new post, especially if it’s just a personal subject or something along those lines. But if you’re writing about a hot topic, any kind of how to, a product review or something which you think would get a lot of traffic, it’s worth those few minutes to find out what keywords people are actually using when they search.

Watch this SEO for blogs screencast I created to get you started:

SEO for Blogs Breakdown

Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (which only requires you to have a free Google account), you are able to access Google’s traffic reports to determine the potential amount of traffic a blog post might receive if it’s well optimized. Just pull up the website and then type in a few words which relate to the topic of your post.

Google will spit back a bunch of related search terms and all you need to do now is select the best one for your post.

In summary, you’re looking for keywords with:

1. Highest Global Monthly Search numbers possible AND “Low” Competition

If two keywords have the same results, look at the CPC number and take the higher one.

You want to focus on only ONE keyword per post.

How to Use the Keywords

You want to use the keywords you select naturally in your post and title. You don’t want your readers to start realizing that you’re intentionally trying to write for search engines — and it just doesn’t flow well on the A weighting of 2% is plenty, which means that the keyword phrase you are using shows up two percent of the time versus all the other words in your post.

Another way to increase the SEO juice of your blog post is to name your pictures in the post to include the keyword you’re targeting at the beginning, as well as put it in the Alt tag when you import photos.

There are lots of SEO plugins for WordPress and I currently use the All in One SEO Pack because I think it’s easy to use, it’s versatile and so far it’s bringing great results.

By the way, I am using a self-hosted WordPress blog here at NOH, but the searching for keywords process works virtually the same for any blog or website, regardless of the platform. I think the benefits of switching to a self-hosted blog are many, but it can also be a challenge if you’ve never done much web programming work of your own. But that’s a post for another day!

What do YOU want to learn about blogging and working from home? What are your questions about SEO for blogs, running a blog, etc?