Using Your Blog To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Blogs can add a natural boost to your organic search engine ranking because they are frequently updated, chock-full-of-links, content-rich sites that search engine spiders love crawling. While blogs instinctively fit with search engines, there are always steps you can take to improve your ranking. Check out these ten tips for making your blog a search engine superstar.

1. Choose Descriptive Titles
Make sure your blog has a noteworthy title. Headlines are given more importance by search engines so make sure you use targeted keyword phrases to describe the topic you are writing about. A good title not only helps your search engine ranking, it gives your readers more clarity about your subject matter.

2. Emphasize the Right Things
Make sure to reinforce the same targeted keywords and phrases you used in your title throughout your writing to establish the relevance of your article to the title.

3. Use Your Keywords in Text Links for ALL inbound and outbound links
Whether you are linking to pages within your site or to external sites, using text links instead of graphics for your navigation links improves your links’ impact on spiders. Also try to include your best keywords in the link text that navigates to pages optimized for those keywords.

4. Use Your Keywords in the Page’s Title Tag
Always make sure your keywords are included in each of your page’s title tags. Try to make your keyword or key phrase the first word of the title. Each page of your site should have its own title tag, with its own keyword.

5. Put Your Keyword in Your Description Tag
Try to include your keywords or phrases in the description tags of your pages once or twice—but don’t go over that or you could be accused of spamming the search engine.

6. Place Your Keywords in a Keywords Tag
Even though many of the major search engines, such as Google no longer look at the keywords tag, some small, specialized engines consider the keyword tag additional relevant text on your page. Include your most important keyword for the page first. Then add a few related keywords or phrases.

7. Make Sure You Use Your Keywords in Heading Tags
In html, H tags are for headers. They range in size from H1 (the largest) to H6 (the smallest) ALL H tags are given more weight than regular text. Bigger H sizes count more than smaller ones so don’t miss out on this keyword treasure trove.

8. Put Your Keywords in Bold Text In Several Places on the Page
Bold text is given more weight than regular text by search engines, so put your keywords into a boldface phrase once or twice on the page.

9. Use Your Keywords in Text Early and Often
Regular text is usually enclosed in a body tag or a paragraph tag within the body tag. Use your keywords once or twice in the first sentence of text. A good rule of thumb is to repeat the keyword two to three times in each paragraph.

10. Use Your Keywords in Alt Tags
Include your keywords in alt text for each image on your Web pages. This is the text that displays when you move your mouse over an image, as well as in speech synthesizers for the blind.