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Writing a great blog post is 
just like making a fantastic dinner. You spend a lot of time producing remarkable content that you want potential customers to eat up and rave about to all of their friends. Still, the meal isn’t the only critical ingredient to a truly great experience. You need to create a clear and relevant menu while setting an inviting table to draw them in and get them to read what you serve up.
Here are 6 steps to setting a great SEO table after you’ve made the meal.
1. Setting the Right Utensils - Choosing Target Keywords.
Before you begin setting the table, you should know what you’re going to eat with. You wouldn’t set the table with different sized spoons if you’re eating sushi, would you? Keywords should be focused around what potential customers may be searching for or discussing on social media sites. Most meals will only require a couple pieces of silverware. You should follow the same rules by choosing 1-2 specific keywords or keyword phrases for each blog article.
2. Be Clear About What’s on the Menu - Write a Great Page Title, Headline and URL.
Your page title, headline and page URL are the most heavily weighed factors in on-page SEO. The keyword you selected in step 1 should be included in all three areas. Menus are categorized so that restaurant patrons can easily find a specific section of food they feel like having. Your website should also be setup so that visitors can easily find the content they’re most interested in, because search engines spiders were able to properly index it.
Feel free to spice up the page title and headline a little beyond just inserting keywords to make it enticing enough for someone to want to read, but keep in mind you have other opportunities to further describe the content in the page description.
3. Getting People to Choose Your Dish – Crafting a Compelling Page Description.
Although it doesn’t affect how you rank, a great page description can get a search engine user to click through to your site over another. It still helps to include keywords in the description to reinforce what the content is about to search engines and users.
This is your chance to really describe the content, and in the case of menu that specific meal and why its so great. You may even want to include a call to action. “Our angel hair pasta is served in our superb garlic sauce with fresh jumbo shrimp. Try it today!”
4. Setting the Table with Flowers and Candles – Enhancing the Visitors Experience with Descriptive Imagery.
The mood and setting of a restaurant will have an impact on your experience. By using appropriate images associated with the blog post you’ll keep the visitors attention and give them a visual reminder of what the blog article is about. Images are great for humans, but search engines can’t understand images unless you describe it with text. Include the keywords or keyword phrases for that page in the image caption, alt-text, and file name of the images.
5. Give Visitors the Opportunity to Rave About the Meal - Add Social Media Buttons to Every Post.
Restaurants love it when people tell others about the great experience they had. Word-of-mouth marketing is extremely effective, and getting your readers to share your articlewith their network can help drive considerably more traffic back to that post. Add social media and social sharing buttons to the top of each article so content can be easily shared right from your blog. The more sharing that goes on, the more opportunity there is for people to find that article remarkable and attract inbound links.
6. Putting a Meal on the Right Dish – Making Sure Your Blog Sits on Your Own Domain.
It’s important to put your meal on the right plate. It all has to fit and be on the appropriate dish. In order to get all the credit from the inbound links you acquire, your blog needs to be connected to your website through a subdomain or subdirectory of your main site. Many blogs are actually hosted by outside providers such as WordPress or Blogger and look like this:
Yourcompany.wordpress.com
In this scenario, all of the authority from inbound links you gain are passed to the blog software provider's website and not to your own website. The number and quality of inbound links accounts for 75% of how you rank in search engines, so it is critical that all of the authority you’re gaining from your blog is passed on to your website.
Make sure that your blog is either setup as a sub-directory of your website like yourcompany.com/blog or a subdomain like blog.yourcompany.com.
What other tips can you apply from the kitchen to optimizing your blog articles?
Photo credit: urbanitystudios
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