With the internet becoming more densely populated, for a blog to rise to the top of the search engine rankings (SERPs) will become more challenging. Here are some SEO methods that bloggers can use to increase their search engine exposure.

First, we will consider blog posts. Each blog post should be tuned to maximize its contribution to the overall SEO effort of your blog.  Usually, each post will appear on the front page of your blog for a period and subsequently be linked to from the front page of your blog.  So it is important that it be fine tuned in accordance with accepted SEO best practices.

For each post, ensure the post title includes its target keyword or keyphrase in the left most position and ensure that you have your permalink structure set up appropriately.

Contribute to the overall crawlability of your blog by linking within context to other articles or post on your blog.  For example, you could start out “In my last post on this topic found here” etc.

If using images and/or links within blog posts, be sure to  include concise and accurate HTML ALT and TITLE tags.

Within the main body of your blog post, attempt to repeat your main target keyword or keyphrase several times.  Some ‘experts’ seem to brand figures of anywhere between 1% to 5% of the overall body text should be keywords.  I have never noticed any empirical conclusions that back up these figures.  But I do recommend repeating your main keyword several times.

Additionally, repeat similar keywords or keyphrases or popular search variants and synonyms of your main keyword or keyphrase.  This will increase your exposure for searches that couple a variant of your keywords.

Where possible and when appropriate, use HTML <strong> tags to emphasize your main keywords or keyphrases.  Some say that this has no overall effect on your SERPs, however, I have noticed some improvement when using this technique in particular situations.  For example, I once had a sports blog and used HTML <strong> tags to highlight inline the names of players.  I used such highlighting consistently for this purpose across the entire blog and mid-term results seemed to indicate that I did start to see more traffic from search engines when these names were used in the search phrases.  Although I do not believe the evidence behind these claims to be entirely anecdotal, the gains might be very small.

Even though increasing organic traffic is important, for a blog to succeed and last long, it is more crucial to write clear compelling content for human readers. After all, it’s the readers who keep the traffic flowing and thus increase the ranking.

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