Is Your Blog Optimized for Search Engines?

Discover blog design tips for better search engine optimization

At one time, blogs were mainly used as online personal journals.

Today, blogs are at the heart of many online content-based businesses. They serve as places to provide content and engage your audience with the topics you both hold dear.

Although there are millions of blogs online, many of them aren’t designed for search engine optimization.

If you have concerns about the design of your blog and whether it’s search engine friendly, SEOmoz recently published an article that goes through blog design for “killer search engine optimization”.

The SEOmoz article includes a great infographic as a visual aid and incorporates 15 design criteria for optimizing your blog for search.

I wanted to address a few of these SEO tips today…The following SEO tips from the SEOmoz article are relevant to online editors and content marketers as they typically have some amount of control over them.

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Five SEO blog design tips

SEO blog design tip #1: Images – Images can be useful to capturing the attention of your audience and getting them to stay on your website longer. However, it’s important to consider the images you use in your articles. The images you use must coincide with the content you produce and should be labeled with your keywords to provide relevance to search engines.

SEO blog design tip #2: Link to Your Best Content – Linking to other content is a favorite pastime of many online editors. If you can link to other articles in a relevant way, you are providing your audience with the opportunity of learning more, while you keep your older content visible.

SEO blog design tip #3: Don’t Overdo Links – Linking to quality content and webpages is good, but doing it too often can cause problems. According to SEOmoz, who cited Google’s Matt Cutts, the number of links of a page should be fewer than 100.

SEO blog design tip #4: Encourage Comments – Blogs are the original social media on the Internet. Don’t forget this, and try to make your blog as interactive as possible. If you don’t blatantly ask for comments, users may be hesitant to openly start the discussion. Be sure to ask for input and do it often.

SEO blog design tip #5: Sharing for Everyone – According to ShareThis, sharing is responsible for 10% of all Internet traffic and 31% of referral traffic. Adding sharing buttons onto your articles will increase your chances of getting your content in front of more eyes.

Do you think these SEO tips will be helpful for your blog? Do you have any other SEO tips for blog design? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

And for all of the SEO design blog tips from SEOmoz, take a look at their recent article.