Hello and welcome to the smart blogging tutorial. Today we’ll be learning about how to optimize your blog posts for the search engine.

If you’ve been wondering about how to make your blog posts visible on the search engines and better optimized for your readers then today’s smart blogging tutorial is for you…

Yes… Because when it comes to writing online, one of the best things you’ll understand is that two million posts are updated on the internet every single day.

In fact, according to a recent report, over 2 million searches are conducted on Google every minute. So if you really want to make your blog posts findable on the internet, there are certain optimizations you must put in place.

Okay this is exactly what I’m talking about… To avoid writing a blog post that’s not read, there’s a way you can update and optimize blog posts so that Google and other search engines will easily bring it up in the search results when someone is looking for a write up like that on the internet.

It’s called Search engine optimization.

Now, there are different kinds of search engine optimization. Like the on-page optimization, off-page optimizations.

The on-page search engine optimization helps your site come up on the search engine result page for a particular keyword. It’s always about the first step you’ll have to take towards optimizing your blog for search engines.

Oh by the way, keywords are search strings people use on the internet when they are searching for stuff on in there.

Okay. So the off page optimization talks about your blogs’ authority on the internet… And this refers to how other websites rates and link to your blog depending on the depth of your blog posts and the kind of influence your content carries.

We’ll be focusing on search engine optimization for blog posts in today’s smart blogging tutorial.

Now let’s dig it starting with…

Page title(post title). This is the most important aspect of your Search Engines Optimization (SEO), for the particular blog post.

Your page title is the small empty space in the area of your blog where you write your content. You can find it up there with an inscription like “enter your title here”.

It is what people see at the top of their browser window, when viewing your post. And it’s the same thing that’s provided in search engine results as the title of your posts.

In order to write an effective page title you must do the following…
*Make it attractive in a way that will make people want to read.

* Include the major keywords. So if your blog posts is about “ways to effectively manage diabetes among elderly people in Nigeria” for instance, and your major keyword is “managing diabetes in Nigeria”, be sure to include the keyword in your page title.

* Put your keywords close to the beginning of the page title. And be sure to use different page title for each of your individual posts. Making each title a reflection of the idea of what you’re writing about in a way that is both attractive and Search engine optimized.

Meta Description. The meta description provides a short summary of your entire write up in the most enticing way. It is what shows up in the search engine results page, below the page link.

While working on your posts, you can locate the meta data space below the writing space in your dashboard area by scrolling down past where you are writing your blog posts

If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, just below that writing area, scroll down to where you have Yoast SEO displayed until you get to “edit snippet”.

From there you can click the edit snippet link and put up your content there… Making sure what you’re writing is not above 150 characters limit.

For you to write an effective meta description for your blog posts, be sure to include your keywords in the description.

According to a poll conducted by Hubspot, close to 50 percent of participants said they only read a post if the meta description in the search results indicates such post is related to what they are searching for…

So If you write it well, this is what will most likely tell a searcher whether your content is relevant or not that’s why you have to make your meta description is both enticing and optimized for the right keyword.

On the other hand, if you don’t choose a meta tag for your blog posts, the search engine might suggest one based on the search query… But it’s better you choose your meta data because you will be in a better position to optimize it as you want it to be.

Heading. These are text that appear more larger than other texts on the page. You can locate it at the topmost part of your writing area, in your WordPress blog, just below the “add media” link.

You’ll notice it is written as “paragraphs”. To use this feature, you’ll need to highlight the particular keywords you’re targeting in the body of the post then click on Heading 1.

Heading 1 tag gives the particular keywords more weight than Heading 2 and so on. That’s why you’ll have to choose at most one Heading 1 tag on a single post, unless you have a very lengthy post then you can use few Heading 2 as a subtitle or title of your paragraphs.

This is done because heading 3, 4 and 5 hardly has much weight so it’s better you avoid it.

Tags and categories. The categories and tags are found just below the post area where you write your blog posts. They are both referred to as taxonomy. Tags and categories helps in sorting your blog posts for easy usability.

A category is used for a more broader grouping of your blog posts based on the topics you write about. Comparing your blog to a book now, the categories is more like a table of content.

So for instance i categorize all our smart blogging tutorial posts on this blog on the “blog” category. The grouping helps readers to find all the tutorial posts at a single spot.

This is also repeated for grouping other sub topics of the blog. In fact, you can check it out by yourself.

The categories gives specific topic to your blog posts so you’ll want to name the categories based on your broadest blog theme and then put each new post at the relevant category before publishing it.

Tags comes in handy when you’re identifying specific details about your posts.

So even when this post you’re reading is categorized under blogging for instance, if you read this tutorial to the end you’ll find tags like: search engine optimization, meta data, page title etc. And I’m adding them as tags because that’s exactly what I’m writing about in this particular post.

You see, the tags are just there to categorize the post in a much more direct manner…

And unlike categories you can ignore the tags and leave it blank (though i don’t recommend this) but your posts will be automatically filed as “uncategorised” if you don’t choose a category for it.

This means you must always choose a category and tags for your posts before publishing them.

So here’s how far we’ll go in today’s smart blogging tutorial. In our next episode of the blogging tutorial, we’ll be talking about how you can add pictures and links to your blog posts.

And just as we wrap up, i want you to understand that the whole importance of Search engine optimization is about making your blog posts readable by both the search bots and human beings… So if you focus on improving the usability by following these steps, you’ll definitely get the SEO benefits.

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