Blog SEO Tips for Non-SEOs: 3 Things Bloggers that Aren’t Search Nerds Forget to Do

Here’s your “duh” of the day: You don’t have to be an SEO to be a good blogger. I bet 90% of search marketers read a blog or five that has nothing to do with search marketing, whether it’s a cooking blog, nail art porn or Andrew Sullivan.

Some of the best and most popular blogs in any given niche get high rankings and lots of links without thinking too hard about SEO. Instead, they focus on:

• Great content: Popular blogs develop huge readerships primarily because the content is awesome; it’s that simple. (Here’s a reminder of the eight qualities that make great content great.)
• Great design: Almost as important as great content is great design – your blog needs to be both attractive and usable. High-quality photographs or illustrations are a big plus.
• Community building: The best bloggers nurture an active, devoted following. New search engine traffic is nice, but they put most of the focus on the readers that keep coming back.
• Social sharing: Good bloggers love their own content, so they’re not shy to share it around when they create something new. They put it up on Twitter, Facebook, etc. post haste. This gets the chain going so people can start reading, sharing, and commenting.

When you’re nailing it in all four areas, you’re doing a good amount of SEO as a matter of course. That’s because Google knows that by serving up your blog in the top of the results, its users are going to be happy.

But there’s still more you could do to make your blog even better. Here are a few tricks that search engine optimizers know and non-SEO bloggers frequently forget.

Add Internal Links

Don’t think of internal linking as “PageRank sculpting” or some shady-hat SEO thing. The main reason to practice regular internal linking is that it makes your site stickier.

If you write for CinemaFunk, you rank on the first page for “movie review blogs.” Good job! But let’s say, for example, that someone lands on your blog after googling “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints Review.” They find your movie review and read it with interest … but do they stick around and read anything else?