SEO Tips for Blogs 

In the beginning web logs or blogs were supposed to be something like an online journal. They are now another tool for businesses to market themselves online. Blogs are now being used not just for the sheer purpose of journaling, but also as means search engine optimization experts use to increase a website’s ranking on search engine results pages.

Bloggers can not only publish their thoughts for free, but also can find themselves getting compensated for writing. This is because one of the techniques in SEO is to create content that is rich in keywords, which is basically what search engines look for in ranking web pages in its results pages.

Here are some tips to help you get started on using a blog as an SEO tool.

Stick to a Theme. Search engines look for themes. Your blogs will never gain a real readership if it is a mishmash of your thoughts. You need to have a coherent theme to bind the blog together. If you are blogging just for the purpose of a journal that is OK. If you want to use your blog as an SEO tool then stick to a theme.

Search engines don't just look for keywords, they also look at whether the page just happens to have a lot of keywords plugged in the post or whether the entire blog is about the target topic. A blog full of keywords will not rank as well as a blog that is build around a theme. Pick a theme that you are interested in so you won’t get tired of writing about it.

Your posts should be titled with words that are closely related to your theme. This will give your posts a URL that is rich in your target keywords, which will help the search engines figure out what keywords to rank your pages high on.

Keep your blog updated. Content for your blog is easy to create. If your get in the habit of posting new content regularly the search engines will visit your blog sites regularly and they will rank you higher in the results. By regularly posting fresh content on your blog, search engines will tend to look to your blog first before others that are not posted to as regularly as your blog.

Reviewing other peoples blogs in your market is a good way to learn how to have a successful blog yourself. Look at blogs that have a good page rank and that’s receiving comments. Do a search to find blogs that are similar to your blog and see what they are doing. It's easy to tell if a blog is doing well by how they rank in Google, how often they are updated and how many comments each blog post has.

Exchange links with other blogs. Another criterion a search engine uses to rank a particular page in the results pages is how many links from other sites point to it. The more incoming links a blog has the higher your blog will rank.

These tips are just to get started on using a blog for as a search engine optimization tool. As you go along, you’ll find more tricks of the trade that will help you push you up the ranks on search engine results pages. Stick to the basics, give it a few weeks and you will see good rankings for your blog.

By Frank Palani Madan