SEO Best Practices for Home Business Bloggers

If you’re blogging to promote your home business, I’ve put together a few SEO best practices to use when creating your posts and pages.

These tips are focused toward “on page optimization”, which means they are factors you can control. Other things come into play when determining how search engines rank your content, but this is a solid foundation for achieving good ranking for what your blog is about.

If you aren’t familiar with SEO (search engine optimization), it is simply the process of ranking high in Google and other engines for keywords that people might search on when looking for your business or opportunity.

Seo best practices for on page optimization are simply the first step in helping to increase traffic and visitors to your blog.

Let’s get started…

Choose Your Basic Theme

Determine the basic theme for the content of your post. This will determine your primary keyword phrase. For example, the primary keyword for this post is “SEO best practices”.

There are various methods and tools for determining what keywords to write your content around. A simple start is to think of what terms you might search on if you were looking for your business. Later, you can use utilities like the free Google keyword tool to begin doing more analysis and determine what search terms you have the best chance to rank highly for.

Write Your Content Title

Here are some SEO best practices for creating the title for your blog post or page.

• Keep the length to 72 characters or less. If it’s any longer, the entire title may not show in search results, which can reduce your click throughs.

• Make the titles at least 4-5 words long.

• Include your primary keyword phrase in the title, as close to the beginning as possible without making it sound awkward.

Create Your Meta Description

Usually, what you enter as your description will be displayed in the search results. You want to make it sound interesting, as this helps improve the chances that someone will click through and visit your blog.

• Keep the length at 165 characters or less so that the entire description is shown in the search results.

• Be sure to include your primary keyword in the description, toward the beginning as much as possible.

General Guidelines for Your Content Body

The body of your content is the text of your post or article. Here are recommended SEO best practices for your body content.

• The length of the post or article should be at least 300 words. Personally, I go with 500 words or slightly more in most of my posts, as many SEO people are now recommending.

• Include at least one image in the body, and when WordPress asks you for the “alt” description, make it your primary keyword phrase.

• Be careful not to overuse the keyword phrase – general wisdom says that if your keyword phrase is above 5-6% of the total body text, search engines might interpret it as keyword stuffing and penalize your content.

• Use your keyword in the first sentence of your post or article, as near the beginning as possible, and bold it.

• Find another occurrence of your keyword around the middle of your content and underline or italicize it.

• Use the keyword in the last sentence or two of your content.

• Use internal linking – find a few phrases in your content that are relevant to other posts on your blog, and link to those posts. For example, if the phrase “network marketing” is in your article or post, link it back to a previous post in your blog that is closely related, as I have just done.

A Tool to Help You

These SEO best practices for your home business blogging will tend to come naturally after you’ve practiced them for a while. If you want to make the process of optimizing your on page SEO simple, consider using Scribe SEO. You can use it for a couple months to get everything down while you’re learning, or keep it long term as a handy assistant for every post and article you write.

Did you get some value from this post? If you did, I would really appreciate you sharing it with others! And, your comments are welcome below!

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