Let’s be honest, any blogger’s dream is that their blog pops up in Google’s first results when people search for a keyword related to it.
And it’s also every blogger’s dream to have hundreds, if not thousands of people visiting their blog each day, right? The truth is that any individual or company that has a blog wants loads of people to visit it. We all want to be read and to offer our blog posts to the world along with our products, ideas and thoughts. So here are the first steps towards achieving this goal:
- When picking keywords to position your blog post, choose keywords that don’t have much competition in your niche. This way you won’t be competing against the big dogs. For finding words with low competition you can use tools like Wordtracker, Google Trends and Yahoo! Buzz Index.
- Use Google to search for a key sentence that includes the keyword that you’ve chosen. So if you choose “optimisation of blogs” as a key word, a phrase that comes up in Google might be “How to optimise your blog for search engines”.
- Then write your blog post using or adapting the low-competition sentence that you found through Google so that the blog post’s title is well positioned for search engines. But be sure to note, and this can’t be stressed enough, that the most important thing here is that the article includes content that will interest its readers. It doesn’t matter how well optimised an article is if at the end of the day the quality is poor. Conversely, if the content’s good, everyone who reads it will go off and link to it on their own blogs and social networks, so it’s really worth the effort.
- Optimise your titles and all of your blog posts’ URLs. Your blog’s name and each of the articles’ titles are really important when you’re thinking about optimising your blog for search engines. You should think hard about the blog name and choose one that truly reflects the blog’s main purpose. Each post should relate completely to its title and you should also try to include the keywords that coincide with those that your visitors use to find your site. But be sure to include them in a natural way so that it doesn’t appear forced.
- Promote each blog post using social media. We’re talking Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Pinterest etc. Another crucial step is to add your blog to different directories, such as the Yahoo directory or DMOZ. These will all count as one more link that will boost your search engine rankings.
- Contribute to forums and other blogs that publish similar content and include your URL at the end of each comment. And for the record, don’t be persuaded that this is spamming. If you put your links on totally unrelated websites this may be so, but if done in such a way that it’s aimed to be of service to the website’s users, you’re just making a useful contribution.
And finally, for all of this you need to be dedicated and consistent and above all you need to put in the time. If you don’t have the time the chances are you won’t ever have a well optimised site, so if you’re too busy with other things, why not leave it to a professional?
And before you click off… do you have anything to add to this article? There must be lots of stuff I’ve missed out 
Picture by Sean MacEntee
