Blogging Best Practices: Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines

Welcome to our series of posts on Blogging Best Practices! Each Thursday for the next 10 weeks, we'll debut a new post designed to help you create great content, share it with the world, and become a better blogger. Let's get started!

One of the most important things you can do to increase traffic to your blog is search engine optimization (SEO). Today we are going to look at best SEO practices when composing a post for your blog.

There are four parts of the post you should focus on for SEO. These are the title, the permalink URL, the keywords, and the excerpt or description.

The post title should describe the contents of the post so that people who find the post via a search engine can tell if it contains the information they are looking for. The title should include one or more likely search keywords. It should not be overly long.

The permalink URL for each post should be short and contain one or more search keywords. The permalink is automatically created from the post title, so effective post titles will automatically create effective permalink URLs. However, you may wish to consider editing the permalink URL to remove extraneous words. For example, the automatically-generated URL for this post was everything.typepad.com/blog/2012/07/optimize-your-posts-for-search-engines.html but I modified it to everything.typepad.com/blog/2012/07/optimize-posts-search-engines.html

Note: We do not recommend changing the permalink URL of an existing post, as this may break links to the post. However, you should keep this in mind when creating new posts on your blog.

Using the Keywords and Excerpt fields of the Compose editor, you can add keywords and a description for each post. This helps improve the search ranking of your posts by telling search engines what is most important about each post.

Want to learn more about SEO or need help figuring out how to optimize your posts? We offer an SEO Service that covers the areas discussed here and many others.

Comments

[The Pet Blog Lady]

I'm a very happy Typepad customer!

[Account Deleted]

Thank You for a good post.
Is there any standard for minimum number of keywords in the body of the post?
I write as the flow is on and do not really concentrate on the key words.
I feel that usage of keywords for the sake of attracting traffic my writing style gets cramped.
I have my site at wordpress site ramanan50.wordpress.com
I have 6 lakh hits in3 years, .
Is this ok?
I am posting the links of my posts to blogspot and Typepad.
They have negligible traffic.
Whereas I get traffic from StumbleUpon.
Why?
Is it incorrect to share on blog spot and Typepad?
Should I create new content for these sites?