SEO TIPS: How to Optimize Your Blog

One piece of information a number of webmasters miss is that optimizing your blog is just as important as optimizing your website. Your blog is positioned to be a rich source of fresh content to your website, and you can obtain great potential to generate traffic to your website simply by optimizing your blog properly. Far too many people look at their blog as little more than a source of backlinks or someplace to plug a new product/service, but that is missing a wealth of power that a blog can deliver. There are a few things you should do to leverage the maximum benefit out of your blog and get the biggest bang for your buck.

Try these tips and you should see an improvement in fairly short order:

The first thing you need to do is migrate your blog to your own servers. When you settle for hosting it with the free hosting packages from blogging platforms such as WordPress or Blogger, you will be limited to use of only  the templates available unless you pay to upgrade services at which point you may as well just migrate the blog to your own server anyway.

When your visitors get to your blog directly without visiting your website, the default templates that are available may not look that professional and can look pretty unimpressive. It is better to be able to design and update a custom design blog that will match your website’s design and evolve with your needs over time. This will make your visitors  feel that they are not out of place when they visit your blog after seeing your website, and it’s definitely worth the extra effort to spend some time and money on getting your blog design customized to have the look and feel of your website. For many people, this is all they have to form an inpression of you with so you have to make the most of it.

Another often overlooked advantage of hosting your own blog, you also will have lot more flexibility as far as SEO is concerned as well. It is hard to effectively optimize your blog when it is hosted with the third party hosting. Making this transition is much easier than you think.

By doing this, you can  add the necessary optimization tags to your blog pages just as you currently do for your website. In most websites the home page of the blog will be called ‘blog’ instead using such a name. When you optimize your blog,  you can use your primary keyword phrase or something related to your service since you are free to customize your blog URL.

Once you do this, all inner posts are automatically saved using the title of your post. Each of the posts you create should feature a title that contains your website’s important keywords. The content of the blog post should also match the heading or the title of each post. This is win-win for you you two times over.

Also add an RSS feed subscription tool to your blog so that if others are interested they can get the RSS feed from your blog. Many webmasters don’t think their own blogs have value, they are just there for random SEO. This is narrow minded way of looking at what you have at your fingertips. Your blog should have valuable content and be used like a tool for visitor snagging and traffic generation. Don’t close potential doors to spread your content just because you don’t see the value in it that others do.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain, so add the RSS button for your blog. Even if only a dozen users subscribe to your RSS feed it is still an added advantage. If you  keep your content interesting you will eventually see more and more people subscribing to your RSS feed. You should keep your blog content well keyworded with an eye on the longtail. Having good keyword concentration in the beginning paragraphs of your blog post is one of the keys to getting good rankings.

Blog posts give you great flexibility which you cannot so easily obtain with your website, so take advantage of this opportunity to SEO your blog and create traffic to it which you can then funnel to your website. Keep your blog posts professional. Mimic the tone and feel of your website; if you always used a distinctly formal style in your website’s content you should maintain that same formal style in your blog content.

You don’t want to confuse visitors with a casual, slang slinging blog when they have come to expect a higher level of professionalism from you. Make sure your services gain a good reputation and don’t damage that reputation with unprofessionalism in your blog – your clients may start wondering if you are unprofessional in other areas as well. Image matters – don’t skimp when it comes to yours.