A client recently asked how he could use his blog to pump up his website’s SEO.  Blogs can have a very positive impact on your website’s SEO if you plan carefully.

7 Tips to Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly

1. Blog Frequently – Blog as often as you can.

2. Optimize Your Blog – Use On-Page Optimization for your blog pages.  On your blog, you can put keyword phrases in your blog’s title, post titles, post content, category names, tag names and the ALT text of photos or images that you use in your posts.

3. Maintain a Focus – You can blog about anything you want.  But, especially when you’re first starting up a blog, make the majority of your posts about real estate and your keywords.  That focus will help the search engines understand the theme of your blog.  

Too often you’ll see blogs with a wide range of categories, none of which contain any discernable keyword phrases.  If you were marketing in Atlanta, for example, your categories should include things like Atlanta Real Estate, Recent Atlanta Homes for Sale, Atlanta Real Estate Market Updates, etc. 

4. Link to Your Website  – Use your blog as a way to get quality incoming links to the pages of your website.  This is a great way to get deep links to the interior pages of your site.  You can write about a variety of topics and link to your community pages, MLS search page, market condition page, etc. and it would make perfect sense within the post.  Use good anchor text in your links to get the most from them.

5. Link to Outside Resources – You don’t want to put too many outgoing links in your posts, but 2 or 3 links to quality outside websites that can be helpful to your readers is a good idea.  You may get a link in return, and the search engines will notice your choice of outgoing links, too.

6. Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories – One way to jump start your blog is to submit it to blog directories to help the search engines find it.  Just do a search for real estate blog directory, and you’ll find quite a number of directories that focus on real estate blogs.

7. Advertise Your Posts – Set your blog up to “ping” Update Services.  If you’re not familiar with pinging or Update Services, take a look at this explanation on the WordPress site.
 
Typically, you can also increase the traffic to your blog by being active on other blogs.  If you read and leave comments on other related blogs, that may bring visitors on that blog to yours.  And, if you leave comments, very often other blog masters will return the favor.