Some people think that SEO is something that can just be ‘done later’ but SEO goes into the way your blog is setup and into everything that you write so it’s a good idea to get an idea about it right at the very beginning so that you don’t have to go back and correct mistakes later on which can be very difficult if not impossible in some cases.

Why is SEO Important?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is a great way to get traffic because it’s completely free and once the traffic begins to flow it can continue to pour in for months or even years. However it can take a while to get to this stage which is a good reason to bear it in mind from the start.

To do SEO you need content that ranks in the search engines and of course with blogs being so content-rich they make excellent candidates. However if you don’t consider your SEO from the outset all those posts may not be at all optimised and your efforts go to waste and hordes of potential traffic could be lost.

Making Sure Your Posts Are Optimised

The first step is to know what keywords you want to rank for. Keyword research is a large topic of its own and there is not room to cover it here so if you are not familar with that do a little research first. However, don’t obsess over this because of a blog has to primarily appeal to humans and not just search engines.

However if your blog is more specialised then it might be obvious what keywords to pick. For example if you had some kind of photography blog and you were reviewing a particular camera then it would make sense to optimise the post for the brand and model of the camera as that it what people would search for. There are several places in the post when you need to place your keyword:

1) The title – the title is the single most important factor and you want your keyword as close to the start as possible.

2) The post content – you need to make sure you are writing about what you want to target! Don’t overdo it but make sure it appears a handful of times throughout the post.

3) Tags – WordPress and other blogging platforms allow you to add tags to posts and this is a great way to add keywords to any post.

4) The URL – it is preferable for your keywords to be embedded in the actual URL rather than having something like www.myblog.com/?p=123

What If You Have Already Written Lots of Posts?

If you already have some earlier posts that you wrote before you learned about SEO there are still some changes you can make retrospectively. One thing that is very important is to ensure that you do not change your URL as this will cause broken links to appear in search engines.

However you can change the text within your posts. You can tweak the titles, the text within the post itself and you can add and modify the post tags. Probably the most important change would be to alter your titles to make sure your keywords are as early as possible. For example, which one of these two is better if you want to rank for “make money online”? :

- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today! – Make Money Blogging – 10 Killer Ideas!

The second one is better as far as SEO goes because the target phrase comes first in the title. Have a read through your article and make sure your keyword is liberally sprinkled throughout the copy text and don’t forget to add a tag if possible.

Once you make changes it can take a while for Google to pick it up and act on it so don’t expect results overnight!