How To Improve The SEO Keywords and Styling Of Your Blogs.

I caught up on all the grading for the last two weeks today and I have some notes for the class.

The first thing I want to go over is keywords. A lot of you guys are just randomly highlighting words on your posts with no real organization or strategy. So, let’s go back to the basics.

SEO Keyword Issues:

Please read: What is a keyword? And How to Pick a Keyword. 

Those two article are good at explaining keywords as a singular keyword versus a keyword phrase.  In this class I am generally pushing each of you to start with keyword phrases.  The reason for this is that it takes a lot of time and money to come up at the top of SERP’s on a singular phrase. Since we don't have money to spend in this class we need to come up with smarter keywords to target. 

For example, a couple of you have blogs about beer.  If you were to try and optimize your blog for the word "beer" you would be competing against thousands of other companies, brand and websites that have a marketing budget and teams of people working on their websites. Want to see who?  It is going to make more sense for you to pick a keyword phrase that you can target easily but would be hard for other companies, websites and blogs to target. (Essentially you are finding your niche).

So, different keywords could be “South Florida Breweries” “Best Place to get a Beer in South Florida” “Boca Raton Beer Deals”.  You could be an expert on any of these and it would be hard for a national advertiser to come up with more relevant content. It is worth noting that all these keyword phrases are geo-targeted but you could easily come up with easy to optimize keyword phrases for beer. Ie. “Brew beer for cheap”, “luxury beers worth drinking”, “how to find cheap beer”, etc.  It depends on your blog really.

You can target keywords for individual posts as well to try and drive new search streams to your blogs each week.  Just remember that you need to reinforce your main blog keywords every week or two. If you need to rethink your keyword for your blog then be sure to do some keyword research.

Styling issues:

Here are some general notes after grading all the blogs today.

- Try to stay away from black backgrounds unless your blog absolutely requires it.  It puts a lot of strain on the eyes and is hard to read.

- I asked you guys to highlight some keywords in your blog. Some of you literally highlighted your keywords.  This is wrong.  I wanted you to highlight words so it was evident to me which keywords you are targeting and because some people say it adds SEO value.  You can highlight with color of it matches your blog, but this will only work in some cases. 

For an example of what I wanted please visit this CrossFit Boca Raton website.  You can see on their website that their primary keyword phrase “CrossFit Boca Raton” is highlighted in Red and bolded. The keyword is in the main page four or five times but is not overdone.  There are other highlighted words in black but these are not for SEO. They are bolded to break up the text and make it look a little nicer.  I would prefer it if you guys did something similar with your blogs for aesthetic appeal and SEO. As an example of very bad SEO practices please take a look at this website.

Here are some of your blogs that did a pretty good job with styling::

http://empoweredvegan.wordpress.com/

http://www.organiclivingweekly.blogspot.com/

http://soflodesigirl.blogspot.com/2014/02/desi-girl-and-hair-problems.html

Here is what this post looked like before I went through and cleaned it up.  Can you imagine reading this blog with it looking like this?:

- Pick a consistent color and style for your links, keyword highlights, and text. Your font should be the exact same for the entire blog. Do not use colored text. Don’t change your highlight colors. Multi-colored fonts for websites went out of style about ten years ago.

- Don’t link for the sake of linking.  Some people wrote something like: "If you didn't get to read last week's review on ABC widgets, click here to check it out."  If they missed your content the can scroll down and see it.  Make it a more natural link. Referencing you old posts is good for seo but it needs to be done naturally.  For example...  "The nice screen on DEF widgets reminds us of the screen on the ABC widget we reviewed before.

- Don’t highlight and focus on the same word over and over.  At most your keywords would be highlighted 5 times on a post.  Even if you have multiple keywords on a page.  And don't stuff keywords onto your page!

-Avoid too much white space and gaps in your blogs.  Use only one space between paragraphs at the most.

Make sure pictures are lined up.  When you finish your blog, hit post and then go back and look at it.  Does everything line up perfect?  If not then go back and edit it and get it to line up nice.

You guys need to think of these things every week when you write a post.  If I ask you to put an alt tag in one week, you need to put them in every week because you now know that is the best practice for images in a blog.