SEO Best Practices for Bloggers: Target readers, relevance, and keywords to boost your search engine marketing!

Focus on Keyword Density

Pick one descriptive key phrase to really zero in on – and focus on achieving the optimum keyword density for that phrase. (Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page). Most people consider optimum keyword density to be about 1 to 3 percent. Remember that using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam and actually hurt your blog’s SEO.

Target Your Readers and Invite the Click!

Always ask yourself – WHY should readers care? By communicating this value to your readers in the title of your blog post, you are inviting more users to click on your link. Remember it’s your job to know your readers and their problems so you can help them understand that there’s a huge BENEFIT to reading your blog.

For example, I recently saw a news item that read: President Signs “Cash for Clunkers” Bill.

Then I saw it posted on a blog with a consumer-driven spin: Tax Break for New “Cash for Clunkers” Program: Do You Qualify for Auto Consumer Stimulus Tax Credit?

Boost SEO Importance and Relevance for Usability

Weaving related blog posts/articles into your content can help create more interaction. But did you know that integrating relates posts into you blog can also can also boost your SEO by increasing internal linking and giving search engines a reason to not forget older blog posts. The WordPress related posts plug-in will make this easy by automatically displaying a list of blog posts related to the current post.

Think Outside Your Blog

Linking out to other sites or web pages can help your search engine performance. Outbound links to high ranking quality sites is good for SEO – and as blog experts point out, sending traffic to other sites is also a good way to start building cyber relationships!

What other SEO blogging tips do you have? If there’s a search engine marketing best practice you’d like to share, please leave a comment below!