Blogging And SEO: Getting The Right Balance

Your blog is pride and joy. It’s a stage for expressing your thoughts, a venue to exhibit your latest photography work, a place to share your industry knowledge. Whatever your passion, whatever the reason for running your own blog, there should always be room to consider SEO and driving search traffic.

So how can you apply best practice SEO techniques to your blog without compromising poetic license or the design and feel of your website? Here are some blogging and SEO tips to help you out…

SEO Tips for Your Blog

Search Engine Optimisation is a very important part of building your own blog, especially if you are self hosted. Using free blogging platforms can provide you with a ready-community, a network of similar blog owners who will become your readers over time.

With a self hosted website, you need to build your following from scratch. But how do you start a following? As well as networking, social media and online PR outreach, you also need to consider SEO.

SEO will drive organic traffic or longtail traffic to your website and as long as you supply connections to your Twitter page, your Facebook fan page or your RSS sign up area, you will be able to work on retention as well.

Here are some top SEO tips for your blog:

Submit a Google sitemap

This is SEO 1O1, not just for blog sites but for all websites. This needs to be done as soon as you start blogging, so Google acknowledges your presence.

Submitting a Google sitemap is just as simple on your blog site. In order to do this, you need to be signed up to WebMaster Tools and follow the instructions provided.

Sign up to Google Analytics

this is relatively simple process to setup. Once you have linked up your URL to Google Analytics, you can access detailed information which can provide you amazing insights into your traffic.

Find out where your traffic is coming from, which keywords are the most popular and view this data at any date range. You can view day to day or month to month, or the whole year.

Install an SEO plugin

There are several plugins available which can help you enhance your onsite SEO. Popular plugins include SEO Yoast, All In One SEO and SEO Smartlinks, and they can help you optimise your site with title tag customisation, meta descriptions and more.

Consider using keywords in your URLS

URL slugs are very important in SEO. If your URL slugs are made up of numbers (usually the date of the post), change this to the custom option or the name of your post.

Write naturally using keywords

the best piece of advice for blog writing is to write naturally. Organic keywords prevent your blog from being penalised by Google for keyword stuffing and other spammy activity. But with each blog post, remember to consider using keywords to drive Google traffic.

Amanda Revie writes for Ingenuity Digital, multilingual and international SEO specialists based in London, UK