1. Think of a good post title

At least one of your keywords that your article will be focused on, needs to enter your title. If you are going to speak about candies and want your article to appear in the search engine, put the word Candy or its derivatives in the post title:

• Everything about candies
• 10 Candy tricks
• 5 things you don’t know about candies
• White chocolate Candies + Caviar?!
• Each candy is sappy, and keeps the dentist happy
• etc.

2. Post shortlink/permalink should equal Title.

It is simple:

• This link http://www.candies.org/?p=984 is ordinary.
• This link http://www.candies.org/10_candy_tricks is SEO optimized.

All blogging software and CMS platforms have options to change this. Make sure you do It in the beginning of your blogging career. Otherwise you will need some digging in old articles you wrote to recheck the links you already made to your other articles and replace the links. The other bad thing will be, that your site is already indexed. For search engines It will look like part of your blog disappeared :D. Do It as soon as you can.

3. Your chosen keyword in <H1>, <H2> and <H3> tags

While indexing your site, the search engines will have a look at your headings. All the words between the <h> tags will weight more in the search results. So if you speak about candies, make sure you insert sub Titles and Headings inside the article that point chapters like “<h1>About  brown candies </h1>”. There are some SEO optimizing software suites that make this for you. I’ve seen the promotional movie @ http://www.seopressor.com/ and am quite impressed.

It is quite expensive software though. And I am not rich blogger 😉

4. Emphasize keywords

… in Bold, Italic and Underline. This is not 100% SEO checked so far. It does look more pretty though. I’ve never seen my bold text to be explicitly scoured for keywords in search engines. And I use the <b> <i> and <u> tags a lot. Even if this is not checked in real life, it gives to the reader more points to focus his attention.

This image's <alt> says Candy 😀

5. Add <alt> tags in images.

This way they enter Image searches for your chosen keyword too. It is also very simple, edit the image’s HTML tags and change the one, that says alt=”something”:

<img title=”alt” src=”https://www.m0rd0r.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/alt-150×150.jpg” alt=”candy” width=”150″ height=”150″ />

Regardless the image says <alt> for picture search engines this images means “Candy”. They can’t decide if the picture has candy on it or not. The only means they know what this picture is about is this ALT tag we just replaced with “Candy”.

6. Density of keyword

Keywords ~ 1.5 – 2% of all words. 2000 words article should mention the chosen keyword 30-40 times. This is a lot of candy :D, but again … 2000 words is quite long article too. Just spam “candy” and “candies” everywhere you can without being annoying or weird. You want your article to be above the others.

Disclaimer and Word of thought: Google and Yahoo! employ good heuristic algorithm for keywords. If you just repeat one word 2000 times, this does not mean you will get high search rank. Exactly the opposite. Your search rank will drop into the toilet until the next time the Search engines index your page. Hopefully you will get your lesson learned until then.

7. Internal links pointing to your other blog posts.

It is not JUST keywords you know. You need to know that your other Candy articles get attention too if this article you just wrote makes the readers interested. The reader attention span is very short. If he is not interested in your current article, he searches “where to click/go next”. It is good this next click to be YOUR blog/site.

There is one web metric system called “bounce rate”. Ideally you want to keep this below 75%. What does this mean?

If you have 1000 visitors per month, 750 visitors will leave your blog being NOT Interested in reading further or going somewhere else, because you have links pointing to other sites. This is 75% bounce rate (750 from 1000 left).

You want bounce rate below 75% or your search engine ranking will suffer. You want your readers to keep reading your other articles.

Enough said.

8. Be regular.

If you like blogging like me – blog. Don’t just wait for miracle 100k readers to come from nowhere. This does not happen overnight. It needs some dedication and good motivation. Some day you will find the perfect article you want to blog about and you will be noticed by everyone.

Until then – Blog about small things. Be there for us at least once a week. The search engines don’t love the sites that don’t get updated often.

If one article is old – It is simply old.

Compare this with a Newspaper article from a journalist at the distant 1934 regarding starting World  war II. It is a very good and strong article that can make you burst in tears. But …

This article will be stored by some librarian somewhere and 60 years later, probably only a few historians will make a reference to the article.

If your whole blog is 1934-ish – no one will come to read you. Only some really dedicated Google junkies like me, that delve sometimes deeper than page 40 of search results for some gems.

10. Don’t struggle having ALL of the above.

If you do, the result will be a very Keyword heavy article that will probably be in 1-st page of search results, but:

• It will be annoying and
• Hard to read, and because of this –
• Regardless of the links posted inside, the bounce rate will be high because the readers will
• Feel like they are trapped inside your keyword mish-mash

Avoid this!

At all costs!

(Bonus) 11. Be helpful.

Even if you strive to be in top 10 (page 1) of search results – It will not happen overnight. If you find something worth investigating and think you can write good article about It – DO IT!

Imagine you’ve been the one found the “unique combination of taste in white chocolate Candy with caviar”.

If you write passionate article of this little something you’ve found and you get interested visitors to read and share your article in the social networks, the corresponding search engines will be glad to raise your rating.

• Facebook reports “likes” to Bing!
• Twitter reports “tweets” to Bing!, Yahoo! and Google.
• Stumble upon reports to no engines.
• Google+ is quite self explaining.
• Yahoo!answers too.

As long as someone with huge circle of friends/readers/followers stumbles/tweets/likes or pluses your article – your visits will skyrocket as will your search engine rank.

Help the others and they will help you too.

HTH