SEO of your Blog  

Today, I am going to talk about that part of  the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process, which an ordinary blogger does not know of, or tends to forget while building his blog. Normally, if you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, a bit of SEO is already done for you, thanks to the WordPress development team. But here are some very important key points that you should remember while running your blog. Let us start from the basics and move on to some advanced techniques.

Title Tag

You should never ignore the importance of your <title> tag. The keywords for your blog/website should be included in the title tag and the length of the title tag should fall between 60-90 characters. The search engine spiders always look through your titles while looking for relevant content. In WordPress, the title tag is usually formed by the name of your blog which can be found in Options menu of the wp-admin section.

URL Keywords 

Make sure that your keywords are also prominent in your blog links. WordPress saves you from the hard work by providing custom permalink feature, which allows you to choose the suitable link structure as per your requirements.

Keywords in Heading Tags 

This is another place where your keywords play a major role. When using WordPress, these tags are commonly used in the post titles (<h2> tags). Remember that your post content should also have those particular keywords that you used in these titles.

Keywords in Image Tags

When using images in your documents or posts, always specify the alt text for the same. Search Engine spiders cannot see the images but they can index their textual descriptions specified in the <alt> tags. This process is also used for validation purposes.

Using Keywords in the Inbound Links 

When your blog gets linked from external websites, make sure to use the exact keywords in the anchor text of the inbound links that you want your website to rank for, in the popular search engines. For example, if I want my website to rank for the search term “WordPress Themes”, I will use these words in the anchor text of my inbound links.

Using Keyword Synonyms 

Sometimes the search engines look for synonyms of the search terms, so it will be a good idea to optimize your blog/website for the synonyms of your keywords as well.

Keyword Density

Make sure that the keywords that you use in your document or posts are of the right quantity and not overused. For your major keywords, the density should not be more than 7% of the total text.

Linking from Related websites 

Inbound links are counted to be healthier if they are coming from similar sites. It basically shows that the competing websites in your niche have voted for your site and this in turn makes your website famous in the relevant community.

Inbound Links from Different IP Addresses

Although there is a lot of controversy on this topic, but some search engines like MSN and Yahoo count multiple links from the same IP as a single link. So, it is always beneficial for you to get inbound links from multiple IP addresses.

Aging Inbound Links

The older your inbound links, the better it is for your website. Just make sure you do not get many inbound links at a single point of time because that will alert the search engines and make them think that you are buying links, which is a no-no nowadays.

Broken Links

Keep checking the links on your website regularly to see if they do not point to resources which are no longer there. If you have broken links, search engines will devalue your website rapidly.

Using Sitemaps 

If your website/blog has an accessible sitemap, all your pages will get indexed by the search engines very quickly. You can also submit the sitemap for your website at Google Webmaster Tools.

Using Robots.txt

If you ban search bots from accessing a considerable part of your website by using the robots.txt file, this might affect the unbanned part of your website as well. So, use it wisely.