Over the couple years I have gotten really good at writing for SEO. What’s this mean? It means that when I write a blog post I always have SEO on the back of my mind. How will this post become findable? What are the best keywords to use? What’s a good headline to bring in people from our content outposts? Here are 3 tips that helped me get started writing for SEO.
1. Think About Search
This is the most valuable tip but yet the most basic. When writing a new post, think about what you would search for to find the post you are writing. Condense that to 4 or five words if possible and use that as your post title.
2. Use Keywords
Not only should you sprinkle the keywords you are targeting within your post, use them in your meta data too! Use your keywords in tags, and most importantly for your meta data using an SEO plugin or something similar. Some SEO’s will say to use a different Page Title than your on page header. In this case you can override the page title using your SEO plugin. This is done because you can target two keyword phrases for two of the highest ranking on page SEO factors.
You should take advantage of a killer plugin from our friends at WordTracker to help you figure out the best keywords to target while your writing your post. This is a firefox extension that you can pop open while you are blogging to help you figure out the best keywords to target. Download it here.
3. Don’t Forget Descriptions
In the world of content outposts descriptions become even more important. Often times the excerpt or meta description travel farther than just your site but to your content outposts as well. The excerpt and meta description travel in your RSS feed and are used by content outposts and aggregators as descriptive text along with the link back to the original blog post. This is important for two reasons.
First, it helps your content outposts to rank in search results. This is important because it creates a scenario where you can rank multiple items on the first page of results for your targeted keyword. Secondly your descriptions help people that are active in your content outposts determine whether or not they will click through to read the full posts. This is also very important.
What tips do you have? Let us know in the comments or jump over to the forum!
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