We all know that building a website is only part of the strategy. If there are no means to market a website, a website will be just another shop in the Sahara desert. With more people online every day, and search engines being the main starting point for most Internet searches, it is important for every blogger to make sure that their blogs are optimized so that they can be found in the major search engines.
Unfortunately, most blogging platforms come out of the box, without much consideration for search engine optimization. As such, bloggers need to be able to modify their blog templates in the right way to ensure maximum optimization.
What are the ways then? What are the things to modify? Here are five to get you started!
1. Page title
There is absolutely no way to argue that the page title is the most important thing to consider for a page when it comes to SEO. Many blog engines like WordPress send titles for individual posts in the format of [Blog Title] >> [Post Title]. This is not good for SEO, rather you should remove the [Blog Title] in individual posts, or put it in the format [Post Title] – [Blog Title]
2. Meta tags
It’s critical to understand that with a permalink created for every post you make, you need to specify a different meta description and keyword meta tag for each post. Most blog engines don’t come with this by default. While most search engines don’t use the meta keyword tag, the meta description tag plays an important role in helping with SEO.
3. Your blog list
Most blogs feature a list of blogs, and from an SEO standpoint, it’s important that these blogs you link to should be relevant to your blog. This not only helps spiders better identify what your blog is about, but also encourages bloggers on your blog list to link back.
4. Blog Archive
Blogs typically feature a reverse chronological order of posts, and as new posts are added to the front page, old posts are removed from the page. It’s important to keep these old posts linked through your front page, one way or another.
Often this is done using a blog file. The advantage of using a good blogging platform is that most of the time the archiving is done automatically. Bloggers can choose to archive by week or by month. However, some may unknowingly adopt a single-column template and layout that doesn’t feature the files.
The key to blog archives is that they will eventually provide a hierarchical view of the blog pages, taking the main blog page as the home page.
The first level of the hierarchy is your blog’s home page, the second is your archives page, which links to the individual posts on the third level.
5. Frequent posts
This is by far the most effective form of search engine optimization. Search engines have a job to do: provide the latest and greatest news to the Internet user behind the search box. By updating your blog frequently, even a few times a day, you’re telling search engines to “Hey, my blog has new content, so come back often!” Blogs that update frequently will see search engine spiders come in frequently to actively search for new content, and only when your post is indexed does it appear on search engine results pages.
