6 Ways to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines

During my readings for the week, I was especially attracted to "Blogging Resource 2-20: 6 Ways to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines" on page 64 of The New Media Driver's License Resource Guide. Author Jim Ludico offers six tips for optimizing your blog posts for search engines.

In order to get a blog to be highly ranked on a Google search, one must make sure that their blog starts with high-quality content. In his first tip, "Start With Quality Content", Jim explains that in order to keep readers on your page and ensure that they return, your blog must be easy to read and appeal to your target audience. I think that this tip is the basis for founding a blog at all. If you want internet users to visit your blog and continue visiting, then you must be posting about something that your audinece would want to actually take time out of their busy day to read.

Once you have a blog up and running, the next step is to make it "findable" by optimizing your posts for search engines. The author also explains the importance of including both internal and external links in your blog post in order to help search engines index your site and identify primary keywords. He also explains that by including links to other websites, your blog instantly becomes more "valuable" to Google. I found this tip to be the most helpful because linking to other websites is so simple to do.

What I have been doing on my blog so far was using the phrase "click here" for links which doesn't link related keywords. Knowing this, I will make that change from now on. It is important to use a term that has to do with both the current page and the page you are linking to so that search engines can tell that there's related content on the linked page.

Another valuable tip from the article is to "Think Like Your Target Audience". This can be done by using words that people would search to find your post, also known as "keywords". This is important also when optimizing the URL of the blog page. A URL that provides targeted keywords is exactly what is needed to accommplish this.

While reading this resource, I came across the phrase "meta titles". This led me search for what a meta title is. According to SEO Marketing World, a meta title is the HTML code that specifies the title of a certain web page. It appears at the top left corner of your browser when you visit a web page. Meta titles tell both the search engines and the reader what's on the page.

Overall, I found this to be an excellent resource for improving my blog. Although I am still a little unsure of the technical details that were discussed, I learned some great tips. I can't wait to start using what I have learned on my own blog. Check it out!