SEO check list to help you optimise your blog

Search Engine Optmization is very deep and wide a topic that any starter can get easily confused/mislead/confused by it’s complexities.
From my experience, SE optimization should be done in a very step by step format, otherwise it would be difficult for you to track your returns or find out exactly as to what are the measure ables that helped you get that particular result on the SERP’s.

For this reason, for all those young bloggers out there, I’ve made a neat SEO check list that might come in handy when doing SEO on your blog. Take this one by one and it would be easy for you to track and manage your results. Please keep in mind that these are intended for blogs and not general websites.

1 - Select a theme that is SEO friendly
You can get carried away with funky designs that’s a treat to the eye. Make sure that the template is also SEO friendly and follows the basic rules of SEO. It may be boring and may make no sense to human reader’s but it does to bots.

2 - Landing page optimization

- Meta tags
Though meta tags are given less importance these days(yes, some big sites just ignore them even!) it’s always safe to have a healthy meta tag/description for your blog.
Points to remember when writing meta tags.

- Start/End text
Make sure that your intended keyword/keywords are carefully used in the footer and/or the top menu(or near the logo) so that they are the words crawled first and last by the bots.Don’t camouflage them in body colour, but use them wisely(don’t just keep repeating them and spam the page). Example - use them near the copyright text in a sentence describing your blog.It’s up to you.

-Title text
Make sure your intended keyword is used in the title text - It has to be there, for the search engine’s to see it in the first place.
Example:Kevin’s blog - Blogger template hacks and workarounds. rather than Kevin’s blog - Welcome to my blog!

3 - Optimizing Posts

- Keyword density for posts
Keep this in mind when you are writing your posts so that you don’t have to edit your post later.Include the top keywords carefully in the posts.

- Title tags
Title tags are extremely important because the title makes the link(like in blogger), and this is crawled by google, so you should be really careful with it. How to write SEO friendly title tags.

4 - Link Management
- This is one factor that you have to check regularly. Maintain a spreadsheet of websites that are linked to you as well as linked from your blog.For a starter, it’s always good to ask for links or link exchanges to other popular bloggers.But be careful with it - when you are selecting blogs to get linked from, select them on the basis of Age of domain,Google PR,Number of incoming links, Traffic etc.Don’t just go for Google PR only - it gives you nothing more than a green bar. Also make sure that you link to your own pages more - internal linking is a crucial factor for Google.

5 - Image tags
Make sure you include images in the posts as well as your blog(like the header image), please don’t keep the page dry without any images at all - it can easily bore a human as well as the bot. Use the image tags wisely, without spamming - careful, optimum use is what I’m talking about.In blogger, image alt tags are not added automatically, so you may want to edit the html manually for every post and add the alt tag.

6 - Title tags and bold text
Make sure that your titles(that contains the important keywords) are enclosed in the H1 and H2 tags (according to decreasing priority), so that bots flag them.Another important point is instead of marking text bold using the b tag, use the strong tag.Because crawlers see the STRONG tag as important and not the Bold tag, which is only a visual element.

These are just a few SEO factors that will help you make a step by step approach towards writing SEO friendly posts and articles.