Search Engine Optimization abbreviated as SEO is a technique which is employed for the promotion of websites, web pages or even blogs. By following the principles of SEO we can greatly increase traffic to the site, and thereby increase the revenue generated by that site. SEO optimizes certain elements of a page or blog so that it can easily be read by search engine crawlers who constantly scan the web for new and popular content. According to the level of optimization, the page gets preference in search results which will help the site to receive more traffic. SEO for a blog is a little different than SEO for a traditional website -Blog SEO puts more focus on getting the attention of the reader searcher by giving them a taste of what they can find in the full article/post.
Keyword Research:
There are many keyword research tools available which give the blog writer multiple keyword suggestions that include (in order) all of the phrases that people most commonly search for search for. We strongly recommend the Goolge Keyword Tool as it is probably the most accurate, and is also free. Keywords play a keen role in the SEO work. We target the keywords that will give us the greatest traffic increase to the site – keywords should always be selected with this goal in mind, while making sure to stay relavent to the blog and its content.
Blog Title and URL:
Try to add keywords or the words which are relevant to the content of the blog in the blog title and if possible add them in the URL. Ensuring your keywords can be found in each of these areas will greatly help to push your blog to the top of the results when these words are searched. The URL you are using for the blog should be meaningful; it should not simply be a collection of your keywords in URL form – remember that getting to the top of the results is just the first step, you still need searchers to click on your site and the only way to encourage them to click is to give them a good synopsis of the content that is on the page.
Updating Content
Updating content is one of the single best ways to boost your position in search engine results. If you have had a website for a while now and are wondering why your site shows so poorly in the results, this is often one of the primary reasons. If your site is a blog, then you should try to add at least 2 new posts a week. If your site is not a blog, you might want to consider adding a blog section. You can also easily create some automatically updating content by adding a twitter feed or an RSS feed that pulls data from other sites in your industry. Twitter and RSS feeds can be added as widgets to your home page.
Links to the Blog:
The more links that point to your blog (from other sites that are ranked well in terms of SEO) the more frequently that your blog is crawled and indexed which in turn will cause your blog to be viewed as more valuable. This will take time, but working to generate a few links every week will have a dramatic effect on the SEO of your blog. This site only has around 150 incoming links and is ranked in the top 2% of all sites. That said, top 2% doesn’t mean all that much, we recommend making the top 0.5% your goal. Some links are more valuable than others – the most high value links come from sites who have many links to them, but who do not link to too many other links. A forum for example might have a lot of links to it, but because it is so easy for anyone to post an outgoing link back to their site, the value of a link from a forum can be very diluted. Links to your blog only help you get to the top of the search results, as we mentioned before – make sure the content that is showing up in the results is attractive to the reader or all the SEO in the world isn’t going to get you any traffic. Typically the search engine will grab the first few sentences of your blog post, so make sure these are of good quality and reflect the content of the rest of the post. You can also use the description meta tags on your pages to specify the text you would like to show.
Writing Articles with Back Links:
An excellent way to generate high quality links to your site is writing articles to be published on other sites. By writing an article you can guarantee that your link will be placed on a page that has very few links to other sites. On this website we publish a lot of guest articles from from web masters trying to raise awareness of their product/service by writing articles that include links back to their sites. Visit our Publish Article page if you would like write an article to be published on the site. The article will appear at the top of our home page immediately after publishing. Our front page has a Google PageRank of 3 (for now..) and we link to very few other pages, so this will provide you with a very high quality link to your site and will ensure that your site gets crawled by search engines almost immediately. You can expect that the article (along with the link to your site) will be in the google results within 10 minutes of publishing.
Content of Blog:
The content of the blog should be different, it shouldn’t be like copied from some other sites, articles or blogs. Copying content directly is an excellent way to lose SEO. If content has already been indexed by the search engine one someone else’s site, it will not index the same content again on your site – doing so would create inefficiency for the customers of the search engine so naturally they avoid that. You can take ideas from other sites and paraphrase and reorganize them to create new and better content, but copy and paste will get you no where.
Long tail Keyword:
Use keywords in such a way that it should comprise of all those words which a user normally look for a particular information. Wide ranges of tools are available which will help you to track such keywords. Some of those tools are Sitemeter, Google Analytics, Mybloglog’s. Get long keywords from the mentioned tool bar and prepare a long set of keywords, and try to use those set of long keywords often within the content of the blog.
Social Bookmarking :
Submit the URL of your blog and your post, along with its content, to social networking sites, which will definitely help the blog to be crawled by the search engine a bit faster. The social bookmarking of the blog will help the blog to get a good ranking on its chosen keywords and help to boost the blog to the top of the results. Links from social bookmarking sites are the easiest kind to get so make make sure to take advantage of them. They are not quite as high value as say, a direct link from the front page of a major website, but they are fundamental to building site SEO in the early stages of any blog.
These are just a few way in which you can boost the SEO of your blog. Good luck! Post any questions in the comments below.