Unit 11: How to Make Your Blog Content Search Friendly

Introduction:

It is important to approach search-friendly article writing from two perspectives. You should approach your blog writing from both a writing perspective and from a technical perspective.

We will provide some tips below to help you meet both these requirements in your blogging.

Let’s look at the writing perspective first.

Refer to your e-book for a full array of options.

Writing Perspective

Choose Your Title Well

Try to think about keyword searches a user would type into Google to find your post. Many successful blog entries start with “How to” or “10 ways to.” Pages 126 and 137 of your e-book give some ideas for choosing article titles. I'd also like you to look at the way
smashingmagazine.com headlines its articles. Smashing Magazine is very successful blog for web design and is regarded as a great free online resource among developers.

Text Layout

Mix your paragraphs with some bulleted points. Bulleted points make ideas clearer for your readers (and the search engines), especially when you consider how so much information today is read in a skimming fashion. Your readers will find better value in your articles if they are clear and concise.

Not all articles, however, should be written this way. You need to have variety, and depending on the type of article or blog, a bulleted format does not always work. For example, if you are publishing a poetry or literature blog, bullets would look awful with the particular design you chose.

Re-purposing and Back Linking

In order to really get your article indexed, you can re-purpose or rewrite an article and publish it on other people’s blogs or on publishing platforms. In your rewritten articles you can have links with your (already researched) keywords linking back to the main article on your own blog. This way you will start to create a natural traffic flow back to your articles, and this natural traffic flow to your content is exactly what the search engines are looking for. Previously, the publishing platform discover.hubpages.com allowed you to link back to your own blog; however, recently this has been disallowed, so you will need to find another publishing platform that will allow backlinks.

Technical Perspective

Semantic

For the technical aspect, ensure the make up and mark up of your articles is semantic. It should be clear what the headings and titles are, what the paragraphs are, and images should have alternate text. You can also switch to the HTML version of the editor to ensure the text is in the correct tags such as <p>, <h1>, <h2>, etc.