Many Internet marketers make the mistake of building blogs with the intent of having only the homepage rank well. The homepages are optimized well and the majority of link building efforts are directed toward the homepage. New blog posts are added in order to keep the homepage updated, so that Google will see new content added to the homepage and so that surfers will have fresh content to look at while on the homepage. This homepage tunnel vision can be detrimental to an SEO campaign because it limits the overall potential of a blog.

The true power of a blog is the ability to have many posts, eventually posts that were written years ago, permanently indexed and ranking well in search engines like Google. The goal for every blog should be to have many posts ranking in the top ten for many different longtail keyword phrases.

The formula to rank many individual blog posts for longtail keywords is below. Before getting to the formula however, it’s important to first evaluate the mindset that many Internet marketers have when it comes to blogging. Many bloggers have the perception that the more blogs you have the more traffic you’ll get. It’s not uncommon to find people who run 50+ blogs. The thinking behind this, when regarding traffic volume, is that every blog contributes a little traffic which when combined with hundreds of blogs equals a large volume of traffic. This mindset needs to be altered in order for the formula to work since it will be necessary to invest more time into a single blog. The blog you use for this formula needs to be seen as a flagship, a primary site you will prioritize over others.

The Old Formula

The same system most Internet marketers use when writing blog posts should now be considered the old formula. This system might be familiar to you. Write a title and a short description that use the same keywords that the homepage targets, toss in a few photos or a video, link everything to your homepage and then move onto the next post.

The New Formula

The new formula is simple; treat every single blog post as if it were the homepage of a new site. A new homepage would be optimized for its own keywords, would contain relevant content, would link to more relevant content and would have other similar sites linking to it. And this is all you need to do to create a blog that collects high volume, high value traffic to many pages and from many keywords. As long as you keep your target keywords of individual posts relative to the target keywords of your homepage you will become viewed by search engines as an authority site for the keywords and will rank well because of it.

Here are a couple of checklists you can use when writing new blog posts.

On-Page Checklist

  • Keyword in URL
  • Keyword in Title
  • Keyword in H1
  • Keyword in first paragraph
  • Keyword in middle paragraph
  • Keyword in last paragraph
  • At least 300 words of written content
  • Keyword in content filenames and in ALT tags
  • Link content thumbs to pages with more content (or WordPress attachment pages)
  • Link to other related posts from within your primary content
  • Link to other highly ranked sites in your niche
  • Mask affiliate links with URL redirection scripts

Off-Page Checklist

  • Get links to individual blog posts from other related, high value, sites
  • Link build from social bookmarks, social networks and from other blogs
  • Links should come from within written content as opposed to from sidebars or footers
  • Link build to all of your posts consistently over time
  • Randomize your anchor text