Blogging Tips: Successful Blogging & SEO

This is part of a series of blogging tips designed to help you write fantastic posts and increase your blog traffic. Here are some more tips you may find useful, and some notes on SEO as well:

• Encourage interaction. Don't just talk at people, ask them what they think. Encourage debate on the subject across the social media you use. It's fine to disagree with people, so long as you do it politely, and don't make it personal.

• Make commenting on your blog easy. Many sites now offer Captcha or similar to avoid spam bots leaving loads of comments on your blog. They're great for stopping spam, but also great for stopping actual comments. A while back someone politely told me that he had given up trying to comment on my blog because they'd taken a couple of attempts at the Captcha and still couldn't get past it. When I stopped and though about it, I realised that yes, actually I often give up on posting my comment if there's a Captcha on there. I removed that option on my blog, and now I just moderate the comments; I get a lot more comments now!

• Try to be consistent with your posting. If you only post once a week that's fine, but make sure you do post once a week, and at a predictable time. If your regular readers are coming back every Tuesday to read your new post, and then one week you don't post until Thursday, you might lose some readers who assume you've abandoned your blog, or just can't be bothered to keep checking back.

• Join in linky's. These are a great way to get new readers, and also to find new blogs to follow. They often come with a set of rules though, about following the host, the post you can link up, leaving comments etc.

• Run a linky. This can be a great way to get new readers and regular blog traffic - but they also come with their problems. As the host of a linky, it's generally considered common courtesy that you visit every blog that has linked up. That's fine if your linky only attracts 10 or 20 blogs (but then, is it achieving what you had hoped it would?) but if it becomes really successful, and you're getting hundreds of people linking up each time, it can become a major drain on your time to visit and comment on them all.

• Write guest posts for other blogs, and have other bloggers guest post on yours. This is a great way to get both blogs a new audience, as people cross over to see a piece by someone whose work they normally read. Make sure though, that any guest posts you have on your blog are relevant to its usual content, and that you are guest posting on blogs that are similar to yours.

• Promote your posts! The world is not sitting at their computer, checking your blog every 5 minutes to see if you've added any new pearls of wisdom. You need to get out there and shout about it! Use whichever social media you prefer, or all of them. I've already written posts about how to use Facebook and Twitter to promote your posts, but consider also using Google+, Linkedin and Pinterest as well. Also sites like Love All Blogs and Scooptub can prove to be really useful.

A word on SEO:

I'm not a big fan of SEO, mainly because I'm lazy, and it feels a bit... cynical. That said, there are some simple things you can do to increase the likelihood of your post showing up in search engines:

• I really think SEO won't work on 90% of my blog posts, because I write about personal interest stuff. Nobody is likely to be Googling what my daughter ate for dinner today, so there's no point in my wasting my time looking at SEO for those posts. Choose which posts you use SEO for!

• Choose your keyword, for example you might be writing a post about childbirth or pregnancy. This is the word you want to be picked up by search engines, the main topic of your post.

• Use Google Adwords to search that word, and see if perhaps there's a similar word that might be a better choice (ie, it has more searches associated with it).

• Once you have chosen your keyword, you want to include it as many times as possible in your post: the title, the URL, the opening paragraph, the closing paragraph, any sub-headings you use in the post, the body of the text, the alt tags of the images in the post.

• In Google Adwords, use the drop-down arrow next to your word, and select "Google Insights for search." This will open a new window showing all sorts of wonderful information, including "related terms." Try to include 4-6 of these related terms in your blog post, throughout the body of the text. Don't do this though, if the related searches would not fit comfortably into your piece; otherwise it just looks clunky and it's obvious you've only added them for SEO purposes.

• Include links to related articles - not necessarily on your blog, but across the web. Link to where you got your information from, or other sites that are useful for this sort of thing. This creates "authority" in the eyes of search engines.

So there you have it: some (hopefully) useful tips for blogging, and some more tips for using SEO on your blog. Please do let me know what you think; are these tips useful? Do you disagree with an of them, or do you have anything to add? If you've used something I've recommended and found it useful, or complete rubbish, please do let me know. And if you've enjoyed this post, please do share it with your friends using the buttons below. Thanks for reading!