What is SEO? We hear this acronym a lot. Well, it means Search Engine Optimization. Basically once you have your blog up and running (See Where do I Start) you would naturally want people to drop by and gain something from your blog.
People discover sites using search engines; personally I am a Google person. You may be a Yahoo person,
whatever it is, Search engines are very critical in getting your blog out in the wind. And it would be especially useful if your site pops up on relevant keyword searches.
I have to say the blog world is a really crowded world. You would want to stand out and be heard. You can follow these tips to make your fruit of labor stand out from the crowd.
Now for the Tips:
1. Make use of Long Tailed Keywords
We know what keywords are but Long Tailed Keywords? Well, they are keywords formed in a string of words typed in by search engine users when they are scouting for information.
For example if you want to search for “Blogs that makes money” you would tend to key in the entire string of words.
What does this mean? To get good hits you’d need to use as much of these strings as possible and there are tools on the web that allows you to look at popular keywords and how current readers finds
your page.
I am using Sitemeter: It is a counter and also allows you to check visitors by referral which shows you were your users come from. If they’ve come to your site via a search attempt then you can see what Long Tailed Keywords they used.
Mybloglog has a feature that tracks where readers came from (Under the search section)
Google Analytics has a similar feature as well.
So what do you do with these keywords? Try to repeat or mention these keyphrases every now and then so that you get constant ranking in those searches. If you note a particular key phrases that brings people to your site, try to talk about it more- maybe worth an entire post on the topic..
2. Outgoing and Incoming Links!
Traffic comes from someplace and the doorways to traffic are links. How do you build links? There are many ways you can do this. Try to write “Link worthy” posts (often these are “DIYs” How-To’s, Strong opinions, controversial discussions, Tips, 101 list which has to be relevant to your blog. Drop some breadcrumbs, drop some quick-links in comments on other blogs with have similar topics. You can write reviews to get backlinks. ReviewMe is offering solutions for these aspects. Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page and usually search engines crawl for these backlinks to determine your popularity. Try to exchange links with relevant blogs by writing to the blog author and request a link exchange.
3. Enrich your blog titles and URL’s with keywords.
Blog titles are very important, the more it contains searchable keywords, phrases that summarize the post’s content the more likely your blog will turn up on searches. So what keywords should I use? Try these free keyword suggestion tools:
Overture
WordTracker
Brandon Hopkins showed how the Wordpress Post Slug can be used to get the some great SEO results
4. Use and Optimize Images
For the past 3 months one of my sister site (http://fishforfood.blogspot.com/) has been getting 60% of it’s traffic from images.
Besides making your blog look cool and arty images can also be used to help you in your optimization efforts.
Here’s how you can optimize your images:
If you are using Wordpress maximize the title tag feature when you upload images. Keyword suggestion tools
can also help you what descriptive keywords to use in labeling your images.
When you upload your images, most people tend to use free hosting sites and usually these sites will change the
image name to some nonsensical codes. That’s not a good thing. If you’ve uploaded an image of Me and Paris Hilton.jpg you want to keep that file name so it pops up on the Search Results Page when someone searches for Paris Hilton... get the drift?
Don’t upload posts that are too huge that it becomes a drag to download your blog which has them. It will annoy readers.
If the images you use are your own, learn how to get credits and traffic by using some simple image editing
skills.
Google also suggests one way to get your images optimized well for their search engine, opt-in to their enhanced image search.
I hope the above will help you quickly get your site out there to the masses. Good luck. Money Shiok let’s make money.
UPDATE: If you want to check your Google ranking try this Google Positioning tool!
