Updated 12/15/17
On-page SEO is something under your control and only your control. By using these blog post SEO on-page techniques every time you create a post, or page, will give you more links out there in the worldwide web and start you on the way to higher search engine ranking.
Use All of These SEO Techniques Consistently
1. Blog post titles carry a lot of weight with search engines. Post titles should be short, descriptive and include your primary keyword phrase at the beginning of the post title. Using the keyword in the post title (url) helps search engines determine relevancy of the post subject.
2. Make use of H1, H2, H3, etc., body tags within your post content. H1 has the highest importance and is usually preset for the post title by your theme. Search engines determine what is important by the body tags. TIP: If you skip from h2 to h6 within a post or page you break the hierarchy, which is not ideal for on-page SEO.
3. A blog post should contain your primary keyword phrase in the opening paragraph and at least once more in the post content. Bold keyword phrases when it makes sense.
4. Use anchor text to link to your other blog posts related to the post. Internal linking helps your visitors see your other content and a great way to allow search engine crawls to find all of your content. Here is the anchor text to the link listed in #7 below. TIP: Use Rel=nofollow for links to external websites.
5. Fill in the meta description in your SEO plugin’s settings on the post. A meta description is the short phrase that shows up in search results and should be concisely handcrafted – not a copy and paste of a sentence from your post – and include your keyword phrase. Here is a snapshot of the meta description I have in my WordPress SEO by Yoast for this post.
Your keyword phrase gets bolded in search results, the objective of handcrafting a concise meta description (a mini advertisement) is to entice a user to click the search result link leading to your post.
6. Categories – less is more and easier for your site visitors! You don’t need 30, 50 or more categories. You may not even need 20, depending on your niche. Categories and tags should be relevant and useful to what someone would search for. Keep categories to one or two per post; and one to three relevant topics for tags.
Think of categories and tags as a cookbook. The index would have Desserts, which would be the “category,” and under Desserts would be listed Cookies, the “tag.” You do NOT have to use tags for the sake of using a tag.
7. Use at least one image per post. An image acts as a preview “ad” or hint to the post’s content when used as a featured image on your blog archives or home page, and when used within the post gives the eyes a resting point. There’s more to images than creating or finding one and uploading it. And please, please, do not upload directly from your camera those huge 300dpi (resolution) 3000px wide images!! I’ve seen RSS to email newsletters have those large images turned upside down and they make for slow page load times, which search engines don’t like.
Name images something keyword rich and SEO relevant to the blog post AND optimize and resize images before uploading to your website. You can’t change an image name after it’s been uploaded.
8. Add keyword-relevant image titles and alt attributes to every image and fill in the keyword-rich description. Why? Search engines can’t “read” images but they can read text. Images also show up in image search results. Tip: Don’t panic – you can easily change or add alt and title attributes to your existing images in pages and blog posts.
Consistently using all 8 of these blog post SEO techniques will help you boost your search engine ranking and get more of your internal content indexed by the major search engines.
