The Ten-Minute Blog Post SEO before you publish!
Ajith | Dec 2008 | Blogging Tips, Site Promotion, SEO
Any website receives human visits from three major traffic categories – direct visits, referral visits and search engine visits. While you, as a webmaster or blogger do not have much control over direct and referral categories, the 
search traffic can be improved drastically via simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks and some discipline.
Assuming that you (1) have submitted your blog to search engines (2) search engine spiders actually crawl your site frequently (3) your blog theme is SEO optimized and (4) you have the All-in-one SEO plugin (or similar) installed on your blog, the following ten-minute touch up for your blog posts will give you more search visitors (Blogger blogs may do only permalink, keyword stuffing and linking part)
#1 Find your keywords and key-phrases
The most basic thing about SEO is that you have to stuff the phrases that typically search visitors search for into your content. Now it doesn’t help if you stuff as many such key-phrases or keywords as possible buy you need to optimally do it and at the right places.
Where to find the keywords?: Google AdWords Keyword Tool is and excellent free tool that gives you a lot of suggestions on what typically people search for. Use ‘Synonyms’ option to get more receommendations and as a thumb rule, don’t go for those keywords that have high competition as your stronger competitors’ pages will beat you in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)
For our usage, that I will mention soon, you need to pick at least 5 to 6 keywords that are meaning-wise equal to the top keywords and getting reasonable number of searches (I shall write about keyword research and various keyword tools in another post)
#2 Your Post Title
Once you have the keywords with you, you need to modify your post title not only to help the referral visits (by having a killer post title) but also the search traffic. For this, include one (or two max) keyword from our shortlist that has the highest number of searches. While doing so, please remember not to make the title sound artificial (e.g. The original title that I planned for this post was The Ten-Minute SEO before you publish Your Blog Post! but it was changed to the current one after stuffing in a phrase that I thought will receive a few search hits, once indexed.
#3 Your Post Permalink
The post titles are human readable phrases where as the permalinks need not be. You can now work on the post permalink to make it a search friendly link. It can even contain more than one search key-phrase from our list. You can also take out unnecessary connecting words from permalinks unless they are part of the actual searched phrases as per the keyword tool. So our permalink now became quick-blog-post-seo-wordpress-seo! This gives the post the possibility of figuring in three different search phrases, which will be as good as the top keyword that your blog cannot compete for.
(There is a myth that your hottest or best key-phrase should be in the beginning of the permalinks. I am not sure how true it is)
#4 Tags
Do not mistake your tags with key phrases or keywords. For example, your WordPress tag should be as generic as possible. For example, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress can form the tag set for this post where as keywords cannot be a little single word. Tags, in fact, help in aggregation (and hence referral visits from aggregators such as Technorati). Two to four is an ideal number for tags per post, according to me.
#5 First 150 characters of your post content
All-in-one SEO Plugin uses the first 150 characters of your post content as the description for the page and hence, you need to stuff a couple of keyphrases in this ‘locomotive’ part of the post content. When you modify this part to put keywords, please read again and again to make sure that you are not killing the flow of the post or meaning.
If you do not want to change this part, you can still do it via All-in-One SEO Pack’s Description setting for the post.
#6 Stuff in keywords in the post content
You have to now use your keywords in a few places in the post so that the blog post content has some of our keywords. It will be more effective if the keywords are used on H2, H3 tags as well as on anchor links. Again, make sure that the readability is not affected by your changes. If you are using any image in your post, its ‘alt’ tag can contain some key-phrases as well.
(A few people believe that making key-phrases ‘bold’ actually helps, though I do not know anything about it)
#7 Keywords section of All-in-One SEO Pack
Now all those keywords and key-phrases that you have shortlisted from the Keyword Tool can be put under the ‘Keywords’ section for the post as a comma separated string. This more or less completes our blog post SEO
#8 Give love to Google
If you mention any Google product or service in your post, please make sure that you ‘follow’ that link (rel=’nofollow’ removed) and I have found that in most cases you get a PR (at least 0) assigned to your page, faster than other pages.
#9 Internal-link using key-phrases
As per #6, you could use as many key-phrases as possible on anchor links. Hence, look for any old posts that can be potentially linked from the post being edited. Also, in the future, remember to use the opportunity to link from newer posts to this one using the keywords that you have.
#10 Review, Rework and Optimize
The keyword based SEO may not be complete in the first publishing itself. You need to monitor the search visits to this particular post via Google Analytics and see if any modification is required in terms of title changes, keyword additions/changes etc. Usually it is not a good idea to change the permalinks – unless absolutely necessary – while editing an old post to do a quick seo. You can play around with titles and keywords under the All-in-One SEO options for the post.
After making your changes, you need to actually ‘Publish’ the post (not just ‘Save’) again to make sure that the spiders crawl and index your reworked post.
I hope the SEO tips mentioned above are useful to you. Please note that I do not do SEO for all my posts but a selected few that I think need more exposure. You may also read one of my olders posts on how to seo your WordPress blog on your own.
Happy SEO!
Great points. I have decided to focus a lot more on SEO traffic and have started using a few of these points already – but I’ll be implementing a few more now
Tom – StandOutBlogger.com’s last blog post… My Goals For StandOutBlogger in 2009
Another great way to promote any product or servive is submitting articles its very common these days for bloggers to use articles from article directorys to ad content to their blogs. With a little effort and time its easy to get your webpages and your blog on some top ten search enine rankings using this method.
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very very nice post, covers lots of points. I agree with you. I follow some of the above points. I have a good traffic from search engine. but, i don’t have enough referral traffic
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Ajith,
Excellent post. I’ve never paid lot of attention to the SEO, except taking care of few items you’ve mentioned in one of your email to me earlier.
I’m planning to spend some quality time following through all the points mentioned in this article. Thanks a lot for putting together such a nice list.
Also, I didn’t know that crawler will not crawl unless you hit ‘Publish’. Anytime I made any update to an old post, I always did Save and never hit Publish. But, I remember crawler seems to pick them up.
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For me I dont really want to focus much on SEO on my personal blogs because it has never been my goal to get huge SEO traffic. anyway thats my opinion…
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Dude awesome in depth post, I just bookmarked it, maybe a link love?
You said that people should “stuff” keywords in to their posts, well is it possible to put in certain keywords too much?
Some seo programs say that their is a perfect balance.
Blog for Bloggers’s last blog post… Guest Posting: What Its All About
I am doing SEO and i was brought when i was searching for SEO.
I have a question from you..
Do you know any tool which can be used like this.
I need a tool when i put URL it should say this url is do-follow or not..
I know about Mozilla plug-in
When i go for a blog which has been recommended as DO-FOLLOW by other people, it still shows highlighted links
If you can put something about the topic i put it would be really nice.
And mail me if you got some more news
Thank you
@Tom, sounds like you are already in the execution path of your SEO plans
Great… Please pass on any tips as well 
My personal goal is 80% search traffic in another three to four months.
@James, but our idea is to create unique content that is useful to everyone out there and then market it via proper optimization. We are not doing any duplication here but just optimizing
@Nihar, good to know that you have great search traffic already. I am sure a lot of your cricket videos are attracting good search traffic. As for referral visits, you need to have the right tags in place (e.g. technorati). Also, you need to be active in forums, yahoo answers etc. Well, that calls for another post
@Ramesh, thanks… In fact, I thought of writing a couple of SEO post as per your request few days ago. As for the ‘Publish’ v/s ‘Save’, I was talking about re-editing an already published post. The idea behind ‘Publish’ is to immediately inform the RPC ping agents (and hence aggregators) to take the updated version. As for the spiders, if the ‘Save’ is already updating the post timestamp in ’sitemap.xml’, there is no need to publish. If not, you have to. It depends on which sitemap creation tool you use as well.
@Melvin, thanks for your views… An extra bit of traffic always helps – especially for passive monetization. Again, it’s an individual’s decision
@Ardit, stuffing keywords is not a bad thing to do if done in a controlled way. That’s one reason why I pick secondary keywords (and not primary ones that get stuffed in several times) and use two to three of them in the content.
@Marblehost, it should not be very difficult to write a piece of code to achive that. Javascript will be the easier option. As I understand you want to provide a URL entry box to your visitors to put in a URL and check if it is do follow, right?
Please note that a URL being do follow is within its context of usage. So if you provide a URL (e.g. a blog URL) and want to know if it’s do follow you have to parse the entire document pointed to by that URL. And you might want to add additional check points (e.g to find if comments are do follow) as well. Anyhow, not a difficult affair
Thanks everyone for your comments and views.
Merry Christmas!
@ Ajith: Thanks for clearing that up.
Blog for Bloggers’s last blog post… Guest Posting: What Its All About
I wanna put your point #1 “Find your keywords and key-phrases” in another way. For those who may not be able to comprehend what Ajith was trying to portray, here goes nothing
Whenever choosing keywords (or keyphrases), put yourself in the place of an average internet user and think…what would I be searching for?
For example, If I am surfing the net, thinking about purchasing “golf clubs”, I may go further into golf clubs; interested in only wedges. Still going deeper, I may be only interested in “sand wedges”. So (being a non technical minded normal online customer) I will, therefore, search for “buy sand wedge golf club” instead of just “golf” in the search engines. This is called targeting long tailed keywords and you would be better off optimizing your site for this keyphrase “buy sand wedge golf club”, instead of just “golf” (which is also highly competitive keyword). Hope this small explanation helps the readers understand this point better.
For point #2 “Your Post Title”, you can optimize your post title with a very handy plugin called “SEO Slugs”. it removes the common fillers (such as, A, the An, etc) from your post title URL to further optimize it for the Search Engines.
Overall very detailed post.
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Interesting. I have never heard about the Google trick… I am always mentioning Google products and help pages. I’ll be sure to ‘unfollow’ my link.
Nice tips.
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@Foresaken, you explained exactly I what I intended in a better way
thanks for that. Yep, there are also plugins available to optimize the post slugs. But what I figured out is that they are not always useful. So I would still do it manually…
@Shirley, this is something I verified myself. Most of my posts that have some kind of Google follow reference are getting indexed faster.
[...] we are not talking about the controlled way of keyword inclusion as discussed in our last post (blog post seo). But they actually stuff so many keywords in the meta tag as well as page body so many times (in [...]
Extremely informative post. Point 1 and point 8 mostly. Never heard of the linking back to google product stuff but I am going to try this.
@Kurt, thanks…. somehow linking to Google seems to work for me
In depth stuff on SEO , the title is the key alongwith the other elements of the page…..
I’m surprised that many people do not use the post permalink of the SEO plugin as this greatly enhances your presence to the search bots depending on keywords used.
I’m not all that interested in keyword stuffing my posts as it spoils my blogging experience. I normally write my post first and then whilst proofreading it I select some words within the post that I feel may make half decent keywords and use those as tags etc.
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@ZK, thanks… Yes, title is the main area along with its page slug. However, it does not help to put anything on the title unless it’s made of H1 tag for single post. Many themes still have H2 tag for the title.
@Sire, keyword stuffing is not mandatory if you have killer titles and meta phrases. However, if you want to take the search traffic % into new levels (such as 75 or 80% you may need to do keyword stuffing as well. The permalink SEO plugin may not be required if you could do that job manually.
#8, Give love to Google, is something news to me. But I suppose you may be right! Big G likes it when people give love to it. Does that mean putting up Adsense should also give SE favours to the site, as Adsense has indirect links to Google?
Domain Marvelous’s last blog post… How to turn domains into dollars – Part 2
@DM, it really works…and will verify further following today’s PR update
This could be an hour for me. Cause I always have problem to find a topic to write
@Dewaji, haha… I am talking about the time required to do keyword research, add them as tags and then change the permalink. Not the time required to write the post
Ajith,
Excellent tips here. “…After making your changes, you need to actually ‘Publish’ the post (not just ‘Save’) again to make sure that the spiders crawl and index your reworked post….”
I didn’t know about this so thanks for this tip. Will publishing it one more time generate another
post notification for your subscribers?
Peter Lee
Can you think of a test that would validate the google love theory?
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