Cool bro. Nice Chiang Mai, Thailand to Vientiane Laos Visa Run posting. I’m going to give you some SEO for on-page content advice. This is a part of what I do for my consulting these days:

Blog Post Length and Images

For blog posts you want 200-300 words and at least one image in the post (better to have 2-3). In addition, the images should have a title=”Image title with keywords” in them. A great place to find images you can use is Flickr. The Flickr advanced search for CC-BY Creative Commons’ licensed works will show images that the owners have made publicly available for any use (including selling or modifying their work).

You want to have a good (but not too long) Title for each post. Travel is too brief a title, think “Thailand, Laos Travel” or “Chiang Mai, Thailand to Vientiane Laos Visa Run”, even better.

Use of Tags and Categories

It is good to use tags and categories, or at least categories for blogging. This helps with people who want to browse a site but also search engine results page ranking can be higher for category pages than for individual posts or a given blog for a specific topic.

Optimize Blog Post URLs

It is also good to have optimized URLs for each post (short with hyphens between words, again using keywords). For example /thailand-islands-chiang-mai-travel/ is a good url for your post.

Subheads with Keywords

Also you want subheads (use

Subhead

to make the subheading). These subheads should be 1-5 words or so and make sure you use a keyword or two that your post is about. Have a few subheads. It is good to have a subhead every two or so paragraphs.

Link-love, Outbound Links

Also, link out to things. Linking to Wikipedia articles is good, as Google considers them relevant. Several links per post is a good target, but longer posts can have even more links (again, to good sites). Then Google is pretty sure you are a good source and will send more search traffic your way.

Blogging, Blogging, Blogging

There are other optimizations for SEO on-page but the biggest one is to have content, content, content, which means to write quite regularly.

These things are what Google considers worthy. This is how you get traffic from search engines.

Cheers and happy blogging!

P.S., check out this great recent article on blogging as exercise for the brain. The author used to run R&D for IBM, very insightful.