Last week I talked about optimizing the comment section of a blog post. After I published that article I thought, Wow, I just ignored the rest of the page! While the comments are important, there should also be a whole body of content above the comments that is also important as well. Therefore, I figured I would put together some tips this week for optimizing a blog post template for SEO.

There are other things that can be done to get increases in traffic from search engines, but these are some tips I see often overlooked and often needed.

Use HTML5

HMTL5 should really be used everywhere. But a blog post is one of the most appropriate places for it. This is because HTML5 takes advantage of semantic markup that defines all of the most important parts of a post. For example the <article>, <aside>, <nav>, and <header> tags are perfect for marking up blog posts. These HTML tags help search engines with page segmentation, and other forms of block level analysis. This is because by using the tags correctly, you are able to communicate to the engines what each piece of content is intended for.

Optimize For Authorship

There is overwhelming evidence now that pages listed in the results that have rich snippets supported by Google Authorship have higher click through rates. And it’s now easier than ever to setup a page for authorship. I often hear clients ask if they can put authorship on product pages, or other none editorial pages. And the truth is, it really depends, but on blog posts it is almost always appropriate. So if you haven’t already, get your authorship setup today!

Link to Related Posts

Here at the Ninjas we are big advocates of internal linking. So much so we created an awesome WordPress plugin to make internal linking a lot easier. One of the most popular ways to increase internal linking is to link to related posts at the bottom of each post. There are a lot of great tools out there to help with this, but the key is to remember the more related each link is, the greater the chance of not only spreading link equity, but also increasing page views, and potentially conversions!

Use Correct Heading Tags

I know this tip seems obvious. But for some odd reason I still see many blogs not using their heading tags the right way. The main headline of the post should be in an H1 tag, and then any supporting headings should descend accordingly. This means that you shouldn’t use a H1 in your site name or logo.

Use Date

There is now a lot of evidence that shows that Google cares a lot about the date of a post or article. Providing the date the post was published in a standard format will help the search engines classify the post in a given date range. Which could help if all of your competitors for a given query have older content.