We keep hearing about “organic traffic” and how important it is for our blogs. Well, organic traffic is the traffic you receive from search engines, based on the level of relevance and optimization of your blog posts. The more relevant for the user’s search term, the higher the ranking in search engine’s results.

Let’s say that you wrote a very interesting and helpful post. You would definitely want it to rank well, and by doing so, attract more traffic to it. This traffic can generate both comments, a base for advertising and also potential backlinks to your post. In short: It’s important.

So, how can you optimize you blog posts? By doing 3 simple things:

1. Optimize your titles;
2. Optimize the post body;
3. Optimize the internal links.

Optimizing the titles

In one of my past posts I’ve told you about the importance of writing SEO friendly titles with the use of H1, H2, H3 tags. And since on single post pages your titles should be listed with H1 tags, search engines will give them maximum attention.

Your post’s title should definitely use the primary keyword, the keyword for which you want the post to rank higher in search results. To decide on your primary keyword and the best form that you could use, you need to run a bit of research on common search habits of users.

For example, let’s say your blog post is about websites where you can find and download images for free. People tend to shorten the search query, so you’ll most probably get only a few searches for a keyword like “images for free”. Instead, the chances are much better for a keyword like “free images”.

Considering this, your post title could be one of the following variations:

• How/Where to find free images
• Free images website(s)
• Search for free images

You should also consult some keyword suggestion tools or even Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which is a very useful application. Another useful service from Google is Google Trends, an application that allows you to access statistics of search trends over periods of time and in different regions of the world.

You can also check out Brian Clark’s article on how to write headlines that work. It’s quite a recommended reading.

Optimizing the post body

Optimizing the title is not enough. You need to do a bit of work on you post’s body too. Using the same technique I’ve described above, focus on finding secondary keywords for you blog post. These are similar or related phrases that could boost your article’s relevance.

If we stick to our “free images” example, an interesting list of secondary keywords could be:
- Free photos
- Free stock images
- Stock photography

Make sure you place secondary keywords in your post’s body, but don’t abuse them. It’s OK to want to attract the search engines, but never to write exclusively for them. At least, out of respect for your readers. They don’t want, and won’t read a spam article.

Optimizing the internal links

Whenever linking to other posts of your blog, make sure you use primary (best) or secondary keywords. This will increase the level of relevance, and also help the readers to better identify the content they should expect when clicking a link.

Also to consider

Whenever you want to optimize you posts, it’s always a good idea to run a search on Google and see how others perform for that search, and what form of the keyword they chose to use.

Also, a good idea would be to study your website’s statistics and re-optimize some of your older posts for keywords that returned your blog, but you did not thought of using initially. This will happen, and if the statistics are “kind enough” to tell us, why not use the free tip?

And this concludes another blog SEO tips post on SEO Sundays at Blogsessive.

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