How To Optimize Your Blog For Both Readers And Search

Both readers and search engines are important for your blog (although personally I feel readers are more important). While optimizing your blog you should keep in mind that your blog doesn’t lose one to gain the other.


Readers are significant, but a big chunk of them are sent by the search engines. Search engines are crucial, but your readers can help you rank better by linking to you. Optimize your blog for both of them.


To run a successful blog you have to optimize it both for your readers and the search engines. You understandably write great content that your readers love but you need search engines — unless you are a celebrity being hounded by your psychopathic fans — to get those readers to your blog.

With millions of web pages and blog posts competing to be found as early as possible on the search engine result pages, it’s very crucial that your post appears on the first page, or at least on the second page of the search engine results, for the keywords and expressions of your choice.


Your readers are your main strength. No matter how much traffic you are able to derive from the search engines, people will leave your blog within the first few seconds if they don’t find something valuable on your blog.

If they like your content, they will not only read it, they will also recommend it and endorse it by linking to it, or mailing it to others. The more they come and the more they link, the better your blog performs at the search engines, and vice-versa. Consequently, your blog should be both reader-friendly and search-engine-friendly.


Here are a few things you can do to achieve both:


Consistently create quality content

Nothing much can be achieved without having relevant content — lots of it. This means generating lots of quality posts. A blog is all about having lots of blog posts that people can go through — whether you have images, videos or text. Since I write, I’ll mostly talk about textual content.

Write consistently because your blog posts are going to be your main strength, they are going to be the capital of your blog, they are going to be the material with which you’ll build the structure of your blogging success.

Keep generating good content for at least a couple of months and follow a pattern: you can have a post every day, or a few posts every day, or a few posts every week or just a post per week. Follow the pattern that suits you. I advise initially write lots of posts so that the search engines have lots of stuff to index. Don’t bother about traffic and comments for the first two or three months — just focus on generating quality content.


Make your blog posts scannable

Making your blog posts scannable means, in case your reader doesn’t want to read the entire post, he or she should quickly be able to skim through the post and be done with it. You can do this by highlighting the main points of your blog post with the help of header tags and blockquotes. For instance, I arrange most of my longer posts under various headings so that if you don’t feel like reading the posts, you can simply go through the headings and make sense of what I’m trying to say through the blog post.

The heading tags also help the search engines decide what the post is all about. Try to put your main keywords between the header tags. Although some SEO experts have begun to doubt the importance of heading tags viz-a-vis search engine rankings, they still matter to the search engines because they highlight your important points and hence are taken seriously by the search engines. So the heading tags help both your readers and the search engines.


Use search engine friendly URLs


A search engine friendly URL is http://www.blogdomain.com/your-title-text-here/. Since there is a great probability that your blog post title will contain your relevant keywords (it definitely should), you’ll have URL preferred by the search engine algorithms: web pages that have the keywords in the URL are ranked higher by the search engines.

Another benefit of having your keywords in your URL is that when people link to your blog post, and if they simply use the URL, your keywords automatically become a part of the anchor text of that incoming link, giving a boost to your search engine rankings. Descriptive text also helps the readers on the other websites know what the link signifies.

Almost all blogging software these days let you create search engine friendly URLs.

Create lots of inter-linking

With time you’ll accumulate scores or maybe hundreds of posts and you’ll get many reasons to link to them to add weight to your current posts. Inter-linking helps your visitors find relevant blog posts. It also helps the search engines crawl your blog faster.

Link to external pages from within your posts

Linking to external pages achieves three things: it adds value to your blog posts as it shows you have researched your topic well and can even provide external sources; it tells the search engines that you link to highly-trusted websites; it pings the other websites and blogs and if they have activated their trackback feature then your link appears on those websites and blogs, sending traffic your direction.

Provide RSS feeds

Your RSS feed lets your readers read your posts without having to visit your blog.
Use your keywords in anchor text and lists and within the bold tag.
Anchor text is the text that appears within.
The search engines take words appearing within these tags seriously. A list signifies that you have a list of important things to say about your keywords or key expressions. When you use your keywords as anchor text, the crawlers think for you the keyword is so important that you are providing further information on it through a link.
Make your keywords bold at least once in your post. Don’t over do it. Just once. It helps sometimes.

Ask other bloggers and web masters to link to you

It’s easier said than done, and frankly, I’ve never done this. I’d prefer if people link to my blog on their own. But it doesn’t harm if you feel a certain blog or website would like to put your link there so you send a polite email to the blogger or the web master. At the most he or she will politely decline, or won’t reply. Some recommend this method of obtaining inbound links, but my suggestion would be, make your content so compelling that people link to it on their own.

Keep your markup clean

Light designs load faster. If you are using a blog theme or a template, make sure it is light. There is no use of having a "killer" design if it takes ages to load and read your blog posts. In fact if you post regularly then you should have a lightweight design that doesn’t have too many images and other obtrusive bells and whistles like animations and JavaScript tricks. Use descriptive alt attributes with all the image tags. Remember that what you write is important. While designing your own blog make sure it is W3C standards compliant because that too affects your search engine rankings.

Use your ads unobtrusively

Once you start publishing your ads, make their appearance as unobtrusive as possible. Always remember that your readers are the backbone of your blog’s success. If they find your ads obtrusive and annoying they’ll stop coming to your blog and then there will be no use of publishing ads there. Keep the ads where they are easily visible but don’t dominate your main content.

Promote your blog

Well-planned promotion not only gets you tons of traffic it also improves your search engine rankings. Submit your blog link or your RSS feed to the big list of blog search engines. Participate on forums and comments sections of other blogs. Submit free articles to websites, ping other blogs and websites and write posts for other blogs (I’m contemplating doing this, so let me know if you want me to guest blog for your blog). Take care that you don’t spam. Good promotion has to be legitimate, and you should add value wherever you interact.

Optimization, both for the search engines and your readers is a continuous process and it works well if you make it a habit so that you keep your blog optimized even without trying hard.





to your success