Search Engine Optimization or SEO is not about deceiving Google or other search engines to become a millionaire overnight but to help them better understand your website and rank it accordingly . Their are various things that you must optimize in your existing blogs to make it more search friendly .
Unique Page Titles
You might have great content on your website but if your title of the post is very general or not in sync with what people are searching on Google you might not get the traffic you deserve . Have a brainsorming session before writing your post and clearly outline what your post is about and what is your target audience .You'll also have to simulate how people might be searching through Google the stuff you have to offer them .
Do some research . Use queries in google to find out the competition for your post and determine how your material is going to be different from others offering similar services Now try to find a relevent but more unique title for your post that is not used by other competitors . But , make sure your title is not too long . You can also use various keyword research tools to find out how people are searching about your niche in search engines .
It is your title that is displayed on Google at the top in bold when a user encounters the search result displaying your page in google search results . So , your title should be catchy and should make the visitor believe that your page is what he's looking for .Ensure that you donot repeat your title for different pages . Provide unique title to each page .Place the description of your web page near the title of the page .
Use meta tags to describe your post
<meta> tags are used to provide brief description of your web page as well as to provide keywords that describe your blog .The meta description might be chosen by Google crawler as the description that is given below the title of your post when your page is displayed in Google search results .Hence , use it to explain the basic idea of your post in a way that it appeals to maximum number of users .
<meta> keywords are used to provide the category and topics within which your page comes . Use them properly so that Google can know about your page's key content .
Optimize your URLs
URLs are importatnt with SEO point of view . Google emphasizes on keeping your URLs short and informative . Use of keywords relevant to your page is highly recommended .If you are publishing a blog then choose your title appropriately as this will also determine your URL .Use of sessions and Id's in your URLs is not recommended .
Optimize your anchor text
Text you provide to link to pages within your own website or some other website play a crucial role in letting search engines know about the context of your link . Choose them wisely . The text you select to link to other pages must contain words that describe that page appropriately . Such text needs to be short and descriptive .
Optimize your images for SEO
Google crawler cannot access the content within your images . So any text within an image is not useful with SEO point of view .But you can use alt tag to successfully describe the context of your image to search engines . When your images are unable to load this alt text is shown to the user . This plays a huge role in Google Image Search listings as Google uses your alt text to determine the context of your image . This can be very helpful as it might be very difficult to reach top of the web search but is easier in case of image search .
Optimize the use of heading tag
There are 6 levels of headings that you can use in your page . After the title tag it is the heading tags that are valued most with SEO point of view .So , divide your post into different sub-categories and use heading tags to uniquely and descriptively describe your post .
Choose domain name wisely
It is important to choose a domain name that is related to the content of your website and contains some of the keywords related to the contextof your website .Your name must not be too long or descriptive , should be easy to remember and catchy . Since , all sub-topics on your website will be related to your domain name and will determine your overall URL for each and every page it is wise to choose a central theme of your website as your domain name . Your domain name alongwith related URLs of your website should cover major keywords related to your topic .
Optimize your internal navigation
Besides the layout of your web page that allows users to view different categories on your website and helps him navigate your website you must also provide links internally i.e.within your pages where you publish your content . Use alt tag to provide such a description to your internal links that they contain keywords that explain the topic of your web page . These links are more efficiently crawled by search engines and help them identify pages that are related to each other as well as to the central theme of your web site . Links are very important and are given greater preference over the content . Meanwhile ,also take into account the number of times you link to a particular page . Provide greater number of internal links to the pages that are more important and have richer content . This will provide them greater rank among all your pages .
Optimize your outbound links
Not only inbound links i.e. links to pages within your site but also outbound links i.e. links to other sites from your pages determine the quality of your pages . Try to link to pages or websites that have a similar niche to you and are highly ranked by google . You can also provide links to lesser known but providing unique content pages from external websites .This improves user experience as he gets more exhaustive knowledge about your topic as well as makes your website more dynamic in the web . After all it's all about linking and getting linked .
How to check your website links on search engines
site:www.xyz.com - Type this in Google or Yahoo to see all the links of your website that are currently being indexed by them . You can know exactly how your web pages are currently shown to the users on search engines .(Replace www.xyz.com with your site's URL)
linkdomain:www.xyz.com- Use this on yahoo to check all the backlinks ( i.e. sites linking to your blog) . More the number of quality(sites having good page rank) backlinks higher your site will be displayed in the search results .
cache:www.xyz.com- Google stores a cache of your website or blog the last time it indexes it . You can use this to know the last time Google crawled your website and to know how Google interprets your blog .
