Improving your blog post's search engine friendliness - Tip #1

Improving your blog post’s search engine friendliness - Tip #1

I’ve been blogging full time now for close to three years and have been reading and talking to a lot of people over the years about the best ways to improve the targeted traffic I get from Google and the other search engines for any one particular blog post I publish.

I thought I would start to share the things I’ve learned that have worked well (and not so well) in a series of blog posts. These are more or less random tips, so my #1 tip isn’t necessarily the most important. After I do ten or so I’ll do a post that ranks them. So here goes.

Tip #1 - Internal Linking

Everyone is always talking about the importance of getting high quality links from other blogs and websites, and while this is hugely important many people overlook their own internal linking.

Generally speaking, when it comes ranking well on search engine page results it’s very important that you do everything you can to make it easy for search engine spiders to figure out what the heck your blog post is about. One of the big clues you can give a search engine as to what your page is about, are the links you include to other pages on your own site. So if you have a blog post about “The History of John Smith” and you refer to a previous post you did on “The History of John Smith” and you put your hyperlink to that post on the words “John Smith,” you’ve provided a lot of information to a search engine that this post is about “The History of John Smith.”

Makes pretty good sense doesn’t it?

If you think about it from a user’s perspective, when someone comes to your site looking for information on “John Smith” you’re serving that person better if you have related links to other information from within your own site that they also might find useful. And this is what search engines are trying to do, help find the best and most relevant information for people that are using their service.

Be warned though, if you don’t have a previous post on your site that is naturally relevant to the post you’re currently working on don’t force the matter, this will probably have a negative effect on your search engine friendliness.

So there you have it, internally linking related material from within your site is a quick and easy way to make any blog post a little more attractive to the Google and Yahoo gods.

I will post more tips over the coming weeks, so be sure to grab The Meaning of Web’s RSS feed by clicking here so you’ll know when I’ve put up another tip.