On Page SEO For Bloggers: Basics And A Bit More

Any blogger worth being called “a blogger” knows that just writing good content isn’t enough – it never was; no matter how useful, unique, well written and detailed your articles are, they’re as good as non existent if no one reads them, you may as well be writing your personal diary. And today you can get people to read your great content mostly in two ways: by promoting it and asking others to promote it through social channels (Facebook, Twitter and other), and by making it visible and accessible in the search results. Now, social media is a promotional channel that you can’t overlook, not today; but in this article we’re going to talk about the other way – how to make the search engines love your content, and how to let them know what your content is about, so that they can serve it to the people searching for it.

On Page SEO for Bloggers

Content before all! – Yes, but optimized content
We can all agree that the most valuable asset of a web page is its content; if it’s useful and unique, by theory it should attract links on its own, and gain search rankings without us doing much; but that’s not quite so. Yes, good content can attract links, but if the page itself isn't clearly saying what it’s about, then the search engines will possibly misinterpret it, and send the wrong people to it, resulting in high bounce rate and lousy user experience. So before everything else, make sure that your content contains the keywords that best describe it – in other words, be specific: you may feel like your car is your baby, but if you’re blogging about it and using the word “baby” instead of the word “car”, you may end up getting a lot of visits from moms who aren't even remotely interested in what you’re talking about.

So, How to Do a Brilliant On Page SEO for Your Content

Title tags are the most important in on page SEO 
These small pieces of code should contain the best and shortest definition of your page, and are one of the most important factors that the search engines are looking at. They appear in the search results, and they’re what people will see when your article is shared on social networks, so make sure that it’s engaging, that it invites people to click on the link. And, for the sake of the search engines, make sure that it contains the exact phrase that you want to rank for.

The title tag should contain less that 70 characters. 

Keywords in the text

Spamming your copy with keywords isn't the solution, but you do have to include the keywords in your article – and it makes sense: why would the search engine bots connect the content of the page to its title, or whatever other element, if the words used in them don’t match? So do use the keywords, but in the natural way; there’s no right or wrong keyword density, so there’s no reason to chase one.

Internal linking and on page SEO
You don’t have the control over most of the links pointing at your website, but the responsibility for your internal links is entirely on you; although these links don’t carry much weight in the sense of the page authority, they are also a signal to the search engines, and therefore shouldn't be neglected. Since you can control everything about them, then you can freely apply the best SEO practiceson them: different anchor text that do and don’t contain the exact and partial keyword (if you’re building more internal links to a certain page), link from your most authoritative pages if you want to “push” the new one, etc. 

Page load time

Make sure that the code on your website is clean, that you don’t have any unnecessary plugins, too big and too many images, that you don’t have any Flash content (if possible), and other things that influence the load time of your pages; Google doesn't like it, and your visitors don’t like it when a page loads for ages, and again, this is something entirely up to you.

There are many more factors that influence the rankings, but these are a few of the most important ones; get them right, and you should have no trouble with the search engines.