Using a blog to highlight your expertise and company is one thing. Using your blog intelligently to showcase your expertise in search engines and your authority to your readers is an entirely different thing. Its not just about what you write, but also how you present it… to the search engines and your readers. Smart bloggers leverage the power of SEO optimized copy and formatting to elevate their reach across human and technical audiences.

In the past we’ve covered SEO for Posts and Pages in WordPress and provided an SEO Copywriting Checklist for WordPress Blogs — each designed to help you leverage simple strategies to boost your SEO efforts. Today, we’re going to take a look at how you really can kill two birds with one stone in your SEO and blogging efforts.

Killer Formatting for SEO and Readers

Formatting matters for SEO and your readers. When you format your blog posts effectively, your blog becomes more appealing to your readers. People really do judge books by their covers. You may not agree but it is what it is. You can not promote yourself as professional and have a blog that looks like your son or daughter built it. As well, if your blog is built right, when you format you’ll also be inserting valuable SEO tags and coding that help you get better traction in the search engines. Taking the time to format kills two birds with one stone.

H1 Tags

Make sure your blog is set up to have every title as an H1 tag. There’s debate about the true value of H tags, but in our testing it is relevant when done consistently and purposefully. Most WordPress themes like Thesis, Genesis and Headway already have this taken care of, but all of them done, especially custom templates, so check.

H2 Tags

Use H2 tags as subheadings within every post. The subheading “Killer Formatting for SEO and Readers” is formatted with H2 tags (Heading 2). If your blog is set up right, you can easily format H2 tags into every post and page. You can find the heading and other formats in the format drop-down when editing posts and pages.

You can even have your WordPress designer set up custom formatting for you, like testimonial boxes, special blockquotes, and more.

Bolding & Emphasis

Bold your keyword(s) and relevant statements/words throughout copy. Format for SEO (bold/emphasize) the first and last instances or reasonably throughout your copy. When used with H tags, bolding and other formatting that emphasizes statements or text can help make your blog content scan-able and easier to consume.

If you review this post and other posts on this blog, you’ll notice we bold keywords and key statements. We also bold when it becomes visually necessary to break up text to make our copy easier to read. We also use blockquotes and other formatting, as you can see within this post.

Images and Media

Images and other forms of media (video, etc.) are great for your readers and SEO. We all know by now, Google and other search engines are universal (pulling everything into search rankings). Optimized images, videos and other files are a great way to leverage different kinds of content in your SEO.

Use images to break up your copy and make sure you optimize your ALT and Title tags with your keywords and/or title of the post.

Relevant Content

Make sure you link to relevant content internally (within your own blog) and externally (from the rest of the world). Internally, you want to make sure you attempt to link to relevant content within your blog on every single post (when applicable). Never miss an opportunity to cross-promote your older content. These internal links will also bring big SEO value to your blog over the long-term. As well, linking outside to relevant content is important.

Great plugins you’ll want to check out to help you easily link inside and outside your blog:

Insights Plugin: A great tool to link to posts on your blog as well as outside your blog to images, videos, Wikipedia entries, Google, Google News, and books.

Apture Plugin: Apture is absolutely awesome. You can easily add relevant content to your blog that is more dynamic than a link to content. This is definitely a must have plugin.

Check out Apture Plugin highlighting a Wikipedia entry:

Apture Plugin highlighting a link to Twitter profile:

Anatomy of Killer Formatting

Put these simple tactics together and the difference is obvious.

Before:

After: