#PetBloggerMonth: Pet Blog Searchability Made Easy

Post by Blog Manager Robbi Hess

SEO. Analytics. Readability. Searchability. Gack! Sometimes it’s just too much to think about when all you want to do is write, right? The amount of time you spend on getting Google love and helping your pet blogging site achieve a high page ranking will depend on what you’ve determined your pet blog’s business path to be.

Do you want to quit your full time job and live the glamorous life of a full time pet blogger? If that’s the case, then you do need to spend some time thinking about the above terms. If, however, you’re a hobby blogger you may not lose too much sleep about your pet blog’s SEO or how high it ranks on a Google search, but then again do you want to spend your time writing into a void?

Here are my quick and dirty tips to optimizing your pet blog and you can do them almost automatically as you’re writing! Here they are:

• Add a link or two. Regardless of what you’re writing you can find an external link to embed in the post. Notice above how I’ve linked to a definition of SEO and to Google… those are external links. I also linked internally to a blog post I’d written before on pet blogging business plans.
• Add a photo. Readers love pretty pictures. Photos also break up the text as no one wants to be faced with a wall of words. Make certain your photos are clear and crisp and that you can legally use the photo you’ve chosen. Choose a photo that highlights what you’re writing about. What do I mean? If you’re blogging about pet grooming, you don’t want to have a picture of someone baking a cake!
• Find a focus and a few focused keywords for your posts. While you don’t want to keyword stuff your posts you do want them to be able to be found if a potential reader was doing a search. In this post I have decided to focus on “pet blogging” and “optimizing your pet blog” and that not only makes this post more focused in general, but if anyone is searching Google for “pet blogging” they just might find this post.
• Use your blogger site tools. If you have a site that allows you to fill in meta data or key words (think SEO by Yoast) you want to take advantage of that tool, fill out the fields and help your post rank. SEO by Yoast is a plug in that offers you a button that glows either red, yellow or green to show that you’ve optimized your post for maximum searchability.
• Make sure your headline shines (and fits within the maximum searchability guidelines of 70 characters or fewer. Many blogging platforms will count your characters when you write a headline. Having a headline that is more than 70 characters is, frankly, excessively long. Make your headline succinct and attention grabbing. You should put as much time into crafting your headline as you do writing your post.

Do you have a “template” that you follow to make sure you’re hitting the high points of writing a blog post? What do I mean? Do you make sure you have a photo, a great headline, a few well-focused keywords and a few links? How do you plot out your blog posts?

(Photo Shutterstock: Puppy and camera)