SEO Tips for Your Blog

By Chris Soames 28 Jul, 2011

Essential

Business blogging

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My experience with clients, is that businesses that produce high quality blogs produce positive results. But what is 'high quality"? Well, the great tips in this infographic from SEOMoz certainly help show how the functional aspects of blog design and layout can help improve blog quality. But as my other tips and links below show, it's the content quality that matters far more than these functional aspects.

Click image to see full size

My tips on creating Quality blogs

It's not just the functional aspects that are important though, so here is a short checklist of my recommendations on creating successful blogging sites / sections:

Use WordPress if possible - In my opinion it is the easiest to use & has such a large following & library of plugins
Submit Sitemap(s) (if the blog is a section of your site include it as a separate sitemap)
Regularly update your blog - I would say 3 times a week minimum
Ensure you share each blog post with your social networks (Twiter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon etc)
Structure your blog posts using H1, H2 & H3's
Make sure all images contain Alt & Title tags
Link out to references & mention then in tweets etc
As mentioned in the infographic make every blog post easily shareable
Be clear WHO you are writing for
Last but not least - Make your content entertaining or educational to ensure it gets read & crucially shared!

More blog SEO inspiration:

These are some of the most useful articles available from the blogging specialists:

Problogger - Darren Rowse on taking your blog SEO to the next level
Copyblogger - Brian Smith on 5 on-page SEO basics
SEOMoz - 21 tactics to increase blog traffic
Seth Godin - 56 ideas on getting traffic to your blog - one of my favouriate posts of all time! Written in 2006 but even more relevant today with the rise of social marketing signals in SEO - this is about the quality of content - what really matters.

By Chris Soames

Chris Soames is a Smart Insights blogger and consultant, he has worked in digital marketing for over 6 years with the last few years managing international web strategies for a leading travel brand. Now the Commercial Director at First 10, an Integrated marketing agency, he helps clients get clarity on their marketing strategy and create campaigns engineered to engage with their consumers to help drive sell-through. Most of all, Chris enjoys working with talented people who want to create great (& commercial) things not just tick boxes.

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