Site structure

Many blog themes from WordPress and other CMS platforms are SEO-friendly right out of the box—but how you set them up, modify them and maintain them makes a big difference in Google’s ability to find and rank your blog’s content.

Avoid long blogrolls on the sidebar, because site-wide outbound links can reduce rankings.
Do not participate in link exchange programs.
Internally link relevant posts on your blog, but do it selectively.
Avoid keyword-optimized anchor text for outbound links unless they are extremely relevant and flow naturally within the narrative.
Use Google Webmaster Tools to identify and fix broken links and other SEO-unfriendly site issues.
Have your own domain.
Have all versions of your blog resolve to the www.domain version.
Use Custom robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling pages you don’t want indexed, such as off-theme content.
Improve page loading speed by upgrading hosting, clearing your cache, compressing images and other techniques.

Content composition

Going back five years or so, SEO copywriting involved a lot of precise rules about how and where to display keywords in a blog post. Today, Google is smart enough to interpret a post’s theme and relevance without strict adherence to these rules – which is great news for bloggers who want to focus on human readers!

Original content generally outranks duplicate content by a wide margin.
Don’t overuse keywords in post text.
Keywords in subheads, italics, bold or within ordered and unordered lists have slightly more power than keywords in plain text.
Word counts aren’t as important as they used to be, but all other things being equal, longer posts rank better than shorter posts.
Your first SEO priority is to write useful, relevant and authoritative content for human readers, because that is what Google is looking for.
To develop new post topics and SEO opportunities, review analytics regularly to identify popular new keywords and strategic long tail keywords.