Blogging can be fun and help drive traffic to your site, but there are a few crucial SEO tips for blogging beginners.

Your blog will be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal when it comes to driving an audience to your site. However, in order to fully capitalize on the great benefits associated with blogging, there are a few SEO tips for blogging beginners that should be well understood before you get started.

Keywords Matter…but in the Right Places

Keyword density has become less relevant with all the more recent changes to Google’s algorithm. Filling your article with keywords will not only look bad, but Google will penalize your post (and possibly your site) for this black hat SEO technique. That said, keywords are still quite important in certain areas.

On your blog, get a keyword in your post title, your meta description and alt tags (in photos). Though packing your article with keywords is no longer an effective technique, knowing where your keywords matter still is.

Always Use Images

A picture is worth a thousand words – and in the case of SEO, a picture can be worth a thousand more visits.

With the proper alt tags (with a keyword) in your photos, you stand to increase the chances of having your blog found by people searching images with your designated keyword. Not only do images make your post look better, there are also some crucial SEO benefits as well, so don’t overlook their importance.

Write for Your Audience

Are you writing for engineers with a highly technical understanding of your subject matter, or do-it-yourselfers with little to no idea how to screw in a lightbulb let alone rewire an electrical system? It is important to identify your target audience and write specifically for them.

Sure, this might mean that the average individual will not relate to your content, but if you are trying to find customers that fall into certain demographics, you need to appeal to them directly. Take a look here for a few more of these blog writing tips.

Do Some Research

You might have a baking blog and want to optimize for the term ‘cake’. Bad news, your post will likely never hit the top spot on Google (not in the foreseeable future, anyway). To get the real benefits of keyword optimization, you are going to need to do a little bit of research.

Find out what your competitors are ranking well for and where there is room for potential. You will want to mix it up, optimizing for keywords that have little competition and occasionally jumping into the mix with the more competitive keywords.

Also, focus on long-tail keywords (‘vanilla frosted layered cake’ instead of ‘cake’). There may not be as many monthly searches for your long-tail keywords, but when people do search for them, you know they will be finding you.

These are just a few of the more important SEO tips for blogging beginners. There is plenty more to learn about SEO along the way, but these should help get you started on the road to blogging success.

What other good SEO tips can you think when it comes to blogging? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!