Friday, June 10, 2011

Blog Basic SEO Tips for Beginners

With the new year, I see many blog resolutions wanting to grow traffic and optimize search engine traffic. I’m sure for many of you, you’re not quite sure HOW to do that. Some sites, like WordPress, claim to be optimized better than others for SEO (search-engine optimization).  But within all the platforms, there are ways to optimize your site to build up more traffic.  I put all of these tips in to effect and find that they substantially help drive traffic to my site.
Once you become a blogger, you see this bloody acronym every where.
What’s so important about it? Does it matter to me?
That depends. How important is website traffic to you? If you’re looking to gain exposure for your blog posts, having your blog found in search engines is a big plus. People searching for specific terms that relate to your posts will be able to find you.
Blog posts are naturally search engine friendly because
  1. blogs are frequently updated with new pages
  2. blog posts are text rich
  3. blog posts have links to other pages that are related to the blog post.
So if you’ve been writing posts consistently, that are of average length and include links to other posts on your site that relate or other blogs that share the same niche, you’re already doing a great job at assisting the search engine spiders.
Spiders?
Spiders my friend.
Ok, not real spiders.
It’s actually a computer program that crawls the www.
It can start crawling anywhere and stop anywhere. It follows  links to get from one site to another. When it’s done crawling, it takes what’s it learned and drops it into a database – a search engine’s database (Google’s, Yahoo’s, Bing’s, etc) where it’s indexed and saved. When a user enters a specific term into, for example, Google’s search box, the results are pulled from that database; ranking is based on relevance to the search term. The higher your post ranks in the search engine, the higher the possibility that your link will be clicked on.
So how do we optimize our blogs for search engines? There’s actually various ways to do this. But let’s start simple.

Basic tips to make your blog post SEO friendly:

  1. Match your content to your title. Don’t name the post “thirty ways to barbeque your mother-in-law” and then write about recycling for the environment.
  2. Use your post topic’s key words in the post’s title and headings tags. This is how the spider “decides” whether your content body is relevant to the post title. For example, if you want your post to be found by users searching for “after bedtime activities” then your post title and heading should have one or more of these words in them. Such as
    • Title: Bedtime Activities For Toddlers
    • (h1)Main Heading: Bedtime Activites
    • (h2)Sub Heading: Toddler Bedtime Stories
    • (h2)Sub Heading: Bedtime Games
    • (h2)Sub Heading: Bedtime Stories
    • (h2)Sub Heading: Tips For Putting Your Toddler Down at Bedtime
    • Quick Rule: Only one Main Heading per post
  3. Use secondary keywords in the body of your post. These are words that relate to the topic. Bold and italicize these words when possible. This also helps your friendly spider. Don’t go crazy, your post will look like crap.
  4. All images should have Alt Text that applies to your post. Spider can’t see images, but if there’s alternate text there, it counts for something.
  5. Include links to other posts on your site and use actual anchor words. If you’re link to a post about barbeque sauces, be sure that the anchor words that are linked to the post is “barbeque sauces”, not the word “here” as we’ve all done. You want the anchor words to be relevant to the post you’re linking to.
  6. Choose Categories and Tags that relate to your post.

Know Your SEO Vocabulary:

SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Pagerank: A 1-10 scale determined by Google.  Algorithms determine your page rank, and it’s Google’s way of determining where you show up in search results.  The higher the score, the better.
Keywords: keywords are descriptive clusters and phrases within the body of your posts. 
META Tags: WordPress and Blogger should both have areas within set up where you can enter META tags.  META Tags are HTML codes that give search engines information on the site & its contents.  So yours might include the city you live in if you’re regional, fashion, shopping, eco-friendly clothing, etc.
Anchor Text: The words that appear in a clickable link.

Simple SEO Tips:

Make sure that your Permalink is rich with keywords.  Unless you go in and edit it, your permalink typically takes on the title that you give the blog post.  Which, if you give your posts artistic titles, musical titles, etc., it won’t really do much good for you in search engines. (See below)


Bold, Italicize, & Link.  Google places more emphasis on words that are in bold, linked, or italicized.  When you link to another blog post, make sure to use keywords–descriptive phrases indicating what the post is about.  It’s better to write “See Jamie’s post on how to curl your hair” than “This post by Jamie is awesome!” because search engines will pick up both the keywords and the linking (called anchor text).  See how I’ve made bold the important first line of each point?  That’s deliberate, as well as being useful for readers scanning the text.

Use your Alt Tags when posting images.  If you post an image through Blogger or WordPress’ tools functions, there is typically a box that says Alt Text/Alternate Text.  In HTML it would look like alt=”words words”.  This allows you to insert keywords in to your image, making it pull up in image searches on those keywords.  An image of Kim Kardashian may have something like alt=”Kim Kardashian, The Kardashians, Kim Kardashian style, Kim Kardashian butt”.  Separate each keyword by a comma.  This will pull your images up in image searches on all the search engines.

Break up content with headers/headings. Like bold, italics, and links, Google gives more weight to the text within header scripts.  So make sure to load them up with descriptive information!

Seek out plugins which help make SEO easier.  WordPress has the free All-In-One-SEO, and many templates have built in SEO optimizing.  Unfortunately, there are no plugins for those using Blogspot (it seems). These plugins typically give you a few categories: like a META Title (which is how your post shows up in search results–like renaming the post title but only in search engines), META description (most of the time the first few lines of your content will come up, but you can change it to make it SEO rich. Google only uses the first 150 characters), and keywords (a way to put in more diverse keywords and synonyms than your post may actually use in the post).

Don’t disable any SEO plugins you have & have been utilizing, without looking up some way to transfer or export/import the data.  My friend did this once and lost all his page rank entirely.  his search engine results for 2 years worth of blogging were lost.  And he had no idea.  Once I figured out the cause and started to repair it, it still took over 5 months to bring his page rank back to half of what it was. If you dont know then ask for help from someone who knows how to fix it.

There are Many Things i haven't include wrote only basic things which you need to know.. Haveing Backlinks for Blog is more important, Increase page ranks by use of "auto-surf webs" use power of social media like face-book, twitter to drive  traffic. Use forums, Article submissions, stories, social bookmarking and many more i can say..

There are whole sites, e-books, and businesses dedicated to SEO, so covering it all in just one post would be impossible.  Here are some great additional resources for you to check out– and if you have questions, or would like me to dedicate a whole post to one area of SEO, please let me know!

Best site for SEO beginners and export - http://www.seobook.com/

2 comments:

  1. Great SEO Strategy. I read your article and all are useful ones, this will help in getting top SERP ranking. I believe if anyone follow these tips they will sure get huge traffic including top ranks in search engines.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yup they will :) Please visit daily... will post quality posts as usual :)

    ReplyDelete

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