How to Build a SEO Friendly Post

A SEO friendly post is based upon a certain set of rules which you must respect just like you do with traffic signs. You need to have control upon your blog, you learn to drive it till it becomes part of your body. The blog should not control you. The moment you master the technique, then you’ll have time to see what’s happening on the road, the road to success. You may be the best content provider and yet not be visible on search engines, at least, not as visible as you would like. In the meantime, you watch other people attracting a bigger audience, maybe with poorer content. Why?

Placing your posts among the first results of Google search engine (let’s face it, we still have to count on their powerful algorithm to survive on the net) is not an exact science. Maybe it is for bots crawling your site but not to us. Some automatism helps but there’s also a lot of intuition implied.

It is all part of a long term process. Keep posting that good content on a steady basis. Get a name on the market. Create your brand. Have an original idea and publicize it, as if your life depended on it. Be yourself, have a style of your own but don’t hide in your shell either. Share with others. Remember no man is an island.

Like a good general, you should have a strategy to win the battle and take care of several open fronts. You have to keep an eye on style, grammar, content, links, etc. Let’s explain this using today’s post as an example. We could have simply provided you with a simplified step by step list. That will do the trick on most occasions. I find it too impersonal though and in general, although useful, I tend not to trust sites abusing on that. How many top ten, top five, top thirteen ways to do so and so better than anyone have you heard of. Outlines are great to remember things but a good image, a well explained idea stays longer and deeper in your mind.

When I start musing about a future post, I approach it like some sort of short story. It needs an introduction, a main idea, an argument that reaches a climax and an epilogue or final blow, preferably with an element of surprise. My readers probably will be thinking about helpful resources, or say, ok, I read your stuff but now come and check mine. That’s normal. Be brief, be concise but intelligent. Make them fall in love with your style. Many will hate you, envy you but few will remain indifferent. Remember all that litany about leaders and what it takes to be a real one. You know.

So we were saying that you needed a short story with a logical sequence. Most people read only the content above the fold and don’t even try to go to the bottom of your front page not to mention the archives. How discouraging! I think it is nobody’s fault. It is a matter of excess of information. Why on earth would someone waste time reading my post if there are thousands of pages with much more experience to consult in the first place? Well, they also had a first time. Every post is like an audition where the jury is giving you a last chance. You could change the jury everyday and rely on new visitors, there are billions of potential readers but it is wiser to make the audience addicted to your writing, create a community, be friendly and have your own followers, they make you what you really are anyway. It is that spirit of trust and cooperation what makes your success grow. But it is not about pretending. Feel it.

You have the audience and the good writing. Now what? Search engines care about that: good content and interaction, in the way of comments and links. Great. But can the information be accessed properly? Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling.  A good structure will facilitate this task so check for broken links, redirects, 404 errors, duplicate content. Providing a sitemap is important. But let’s take for granted that you already have those things under control and stick to the post level. If you want to know more check How does Google work?.

All good stories start with an attractive title. Coming up with the right title including keywords related to your niche guarantees almost fifty percent of a post’s success. My title today is not fascinating, it talks about a well trodden matter so I cannot do miracles. Nevertheless, I  took the time to check other similar posts on the engines and assessed the possibilities of being well indexed or not. I noticed there is a “Make a SEO Friendly Post” so I thought the word build would do the trick. It is important that you check the existence of a similar combination of words. Don’t be afraid to add a third or a fourth. With time you get to choose your own odd phrases automatically.There are free tools to help you choose good keywords. Do try Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Or an all-in-one service like SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. On the other hand it is a shame that search engines are controlled by marketing companies and SEO experts who know all the tricks to make clients show on top. Accept the fact that they will also use perfect SEO friendly keywords. Try to be better. Your visitors will probably surf for good content and not for marketing products. In my other blog called Barcelona Photoblog, I have to compete with many sites focusing on the travel sector. Go and google the word Barcelona and tell me how many sites you find talking about the city without blatantly showing booking searchlets or accomodation prices first. There are good travel guides but top pages are controlled by a few people in the accommodation business. They will take a big share so you have to swim twice as hard to stay among them. An awesome, unique title, that reaches those niches they wouldn’t think of not even in their wildest dreams is certainly the right way to start. Remember to use a bigger font size in the header cause bots give credit to that. Be clear. You may be an expert, a specialist in your area, go ahead and talk about quantum physics if you must but always include keywords that are relatively common and looked up by a wide segment of people. It does not matter if you reach too many. You wanted visitors, didn’t you?. Combined them in a way that the most attractive and relevant words come first. Then add that unusual touch at the end. I don’t know, things like: Easy Quantum Physics Lessons Stephen Hawkings Never Taught. Wild but relevant.

Step into the content now. It is essential that you repeat some words from the title in the first lines. It is not compulsory but never place them too far. Your own judgment will tell you. Try to use bold or italics to highlight the most important keywords in your paragraphs. My advice, use italics for places, names, etc and bold in only one word or phrase. Repeat keywords. That makes your idea more relevant. But watch out so there’s not too much iteration. You are a writer and need to keep your style clean. Avoid misspelling, grammar mistakes. Don’t try to be like Joyce or Proust. Colloquial talk won’t hurt your credibility if well administered. Elevated conversation may give the wrong impression, specially to new visitors. Avoid the opposite as well. Offensive language, obscene words are not advisable. Try not to link to so called bad neighborhoods: those sites related to activities who may be banned by Google. They may affect your PR and reputation on the web. Try this bad neighborhood link checker and find out who’s behind that harmless link on your sidebar.

Try to use videos, maps, slides, whatever multimedia resource that will serve to portray your ideas. Be of help. If you talk about a place, give directions, links, phone numbers. When your readers leave your site they must be already longing to return. That little spark must catch on them so they remember you are there with your interesting writings and tips. Anyone can give tips no matter how modest they are. Look at me!

Constantly check the engines and contemplate your posts silently go up from the deep dark pages nobody cares about towards the first ten results. Don’t forget to introduce some relevant metatags in your html code. This seems to be less important nowadays for the spiders but it is not harmful. About twenty would be great, not more. By the way, check that you are not blocking the bots. There must be this line of code somewhere in the meta tags:  meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” or meta name=”robots” content=”all”.

Another fantastic way to guarantee you are indexed often is to verify your blog via Google Webmaster’s Tools. Also remember that your feed is one of the best instruments to propagate your work on the world wide web. Notify RSS engines everytime you post by sending a ping. Although some hosts offer a pinging service it is a good idea that you try free ping services or shareware programs like Blog Blaster or RSS submit by Ksoft or RSS Submit by Extralabs to instantly reach every possible blog or RSS search engine on the market. Or even better make use of social networks like Twitter, Facebook-Friendfeed, SocialMedian, Mashable, whatever, to tell the world you wrote something new. Although social networking has come to stay and bloggers were in danger of extinction, there seems to be some kind of renaissance for good old familiar bloggers. Not everything is about chatting, twitting, sending karmas and giving Likes. There must be some solid content with a style of your own in a place of your own. That’s what makes your work unique. Social networks must be a tool and not an obstacle that impoverishes your creativity, your art or whatever you are good at.

Don’t quit on your content, control all those open fronts, be stubborn. In about 3 months I guarantee you will get results and your posts will be on top of the charts.

If you have any doubt and still wonder what to do next please tell me about your blog and what your plans are. I will be glad to help.

Tagged as: blogging, SEO