SEO can benefit bloggers because whatever their blog is based around – be it selling something, providing a service, getting the message of a charity, or entertainment in the form of a hobby – they want as many visitors as possible. In essence, they want it to be successful. For bloggers to increase visitors to their site, they need to know how search engines work, and this is where SEO comes into play. Knowing how to optimize your blog so that search engines find and rank it higher than your competition is crucial. When it comes to online businesses, it’s the same basic idea only a different result. More visitors generally means more money.
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves making specific changes to your website design and content in order to make your site more attractive to the search engines. SEO can be broken down into two main areas: on-page SEO, which concerns everything on your site, and off-page SEO, which is concerned with all activity that takes place away from your site. Moreover, SEO is an ongoing process because the algorithms that search engines use to rank sites are becoming increasingly complex and change frequently.
What is SEO?
The reason SEO is very important for bloggers is that if the blog has good visibility in the search engine, it will facilitate the search by visitors. Let’s take the example of a blog about a 3-column header. If the search engine quickly displays our blog with the keyword “3-column header”, it is very likely that visitors will click on what Google displays on the first page. People are often too lazy to move to another page and click on the next. Now, if visitors click on our blog from the search engine, we will have visitors and it will make us happy because our blog is being sought after. Now, happy bloggers can find another problem for the visitor.
SEO is short for “search engine optimization”. SEO, or the full meaning search engine optimization, aims to increase the visibility of blogs in search engines. This certainly aims to increase the traffic of bloggers and the blog itself. SEO is a skill that is sought after and not everyone has it. Because SEO service is very important, sometimes bloggers are willing to hire experts in this field. These tips are shared by blogger experts and have been proven to increase the visibility of the blog in search engines.
Why is SEO important for bloggers?
Search engine optimization, often referred to as SEO, is a strategic process used to improve a website or web document’s ranking in search engines’ organic placement, especially on Google.com. With lots of competition for the same readers, bloggers need to be at the top of their game with SEO if they want their target audience to find their blog. There are a number of reasons why SEO is so important for bloggers and if it’s used to its full potential, it can have a lot of benefits. Starting with the most basic, using SEO to increase your ranking with your blog can increase your traffic. When you have increased traffic, it also means you have an increase in readers and a larger audience. This is a notable beneficial end result for any blogger. Second, using SEO to get your target audience to your site can increase relevancy. This means that the visitors coming to your site are actually interested in the information provided and are more likely to return to read more articles and leave comments. Measurable results are another positive from using SEO. This means you can see which aspects of your blog are successful and which are not, so you can implement changes using split testing. This process can make your blog more effective and cost-efficient. Step four: cost effectiveness. SEO is long term and once your site has ranking, there is little need to continue paying lots of money to ad campaigns. Keep that great position on the search engine and your traffic will increase organically. Last and most important for a lot of bloggers: increasing your blog ranking using great SEO can give you satisfaction. No blogger wants to put their blood, sweat, and tears into an article for no one to read it. A high-ranking blog has that sense of accomplishment and recognition. SEO has been increasing in its popularity over the years and every blogger serious about their craft and their audience should be utilizing it.
How can SEO benefit your blog?
Getting the SEO basics is probably the first place you should start. SEO can make a huge difference in your blog because it will make your blog more visible, which in turn can send traffic to your blog and increase your readers and email subscribers. SEO is using Search Engine Optimization and keyword placement to make your website show up more often in search engines. This is important because the majority of the traffic on the web is driven by search engines. Specifically, the three most important are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If you can cater to the demands of those search engines, then your blog could receive a lot of attention. An example could be when a reader searches “How to make a website” and your blog post shows up in the search engine. This could attract a reader that is interested in the subject at hand, and then that person could become a loyal reader who reads your blog frequently. The more readers you have will bring more email subscribers and loyal readers, which will be beneficial to promoting any type of product/recommendation that you make on your website.
On-Page Optimization
On-page is a very important factor in search engine optimization, and many bloggers are not aware of how to use on-page optimization to increase rankings. This is one area that can easily be applied and can really help your blog. It’s also very easy to do. The primary focus of on-page optimization is the use of keyword usage. Keyword research is the most important factor in on-page optimization. After that, the use of the keyword in titles, content, meta tags, and descriptions all play an important role. The following is detailed information on each of these factors and how they can be applied. When using keywords, you first need to have good keyword research. Using the Google AdWords keyword tool is very helpful for this. You need to target keywords that have a good amount of search volume – although not too high. High search volume means lots of competition. Try to target long-tail keywords that are 3-4 words long. These have lower search volume but are easier to rank for. Long-tail keywords also have a better conversion rate. Always keep on brainstorming new keywords and testing them. Over time, you will re-evaluate and change your keywords to try and increase rankings. After you have your targeted keywords, you need to use them in your blog post title. Sometimes this may mean having to re-title your post to something that is more of a keyword-targeted phrase. You never want to force this, but over time you will become better at using keywords as title adjectives and writing title phrases around a keyword. This, in my opinion, is the most difficult thing to do – I find it challenging. At any rate, the title is the most important part of the post to use the keyword. Don’t overdo it though, as this may lead to keyword stuffing. A good blog post title with the keyword will also have a good effect in pinging and blog directories.
Keyword research
In addition to finding keywords that work, it’s also necessary to weed out ones that don’t. A common mistake of bloggers is the inclusion of irrelevant or unrelated keywords on their site. By taking the time to do proper research, you can find out if your ideas are misguided. This knowledge will give you the understanding you need to write in a way that resonates with your audience.
Keyword research is the bread and butter of any search campaign. You won’t get far unless you know which keywords your target market is using to find solutions to their problems. While this may seem fairly obvious, a lot of bloggers fail to do this step effectively. This is because some of them lack the foresight to find keywords that will generate higher conversions. A keyword may generate a high volume of traffic, but if it doesn’t convert, it’s not an ideal situation.
Optimizing blog post titles
Use keywords that people would use when searching for your topic. If you’ve done your keyword research, you should already have a list of keywords that you would like to target for this post. Include these in your title. Note: It’s important not to put too many keywords in the title. You want to keep the title understandable. A string of keywords doesn’t make much sense and a title that doesn’t make sense won’t get clicks. An example of a good keyword-rich title: “10 easy recipes to help your child eat their vegetables – sneaky ways to success”. This title targets anyone looking for tips to get their child to eat vegetables.
Make sure that your title is both descriptive and an eye catcher. Don’t go overboard with making your title catchy. A lot of people make the mistake of putting something like “you won’t believe this awesome recipe!” But a much better title for SEO would be “Healthy chicken soup: best way to fight a cold”. The second title is both eye-catching and descriptive. We all want our post to look interesting and get that click. But the more descriptive title will bring in traffic from people searching for chicken soup recipes or ways to get rid of a cold.
Choosing an optimized title is very important to make sure that your blog is search engine friendly. A good title will make sure that it’s highlighted on the search engine whenever someone types a relative query.
Writing high-quality content
Writing high-quality content is one of the trickiest things that bloggers have to do. Many bloggers feel that they’re already producing high-quality content, when in reality they’re not. There are a few types of content that you can produce. Some content, such as memes (funny visual images), can be entertaining but isn’t of high quality. Other content, such as a 200-word article about a Super Bowl prediction, isn’t necessarily low quality but it isn’t the type of content that’s going to get you rankings in the search engines. The content that’s going to get you good rankings is content that is both unique and very useful. By useful, we mean that the content answers some sort of question that people are searching for in Google, provides them with information, or helps them solve a problem. A How-To guide is a perfect example of high-quality content because it’s genuinely helpful to people. This doesn’t mean that you need to write a 2000-word masterpiece for every article that you write, but generally speaking, articles should be in the 400-800 word range. Unique content is always going to get you more search engine traffic. If you’re using PLR articles for your blog, there’s a good chance that you’re not going to get much search engine traffic because the same articles are probably used on many other sites. Step one is to try to brainstorm and come up with your own ideas and write articles based off of those ideas. Step two is to write a creative, unique article on a topic in your own words. High-quality content is also the type of content that naturally obtains backlinks. When people link to content, they generally always link to an actual page on a site instead of a page of some commercial product. This means that you’re going to need to write more than just product reviews. How-tos, guides, and articles are the types of pages that get links. If you have a blog full of informative articles, don’t be surprised if you start getting some backlinks without even asking for them.
Using meta tags and descriptions
Meta tags are a great way for search engines to determine the content of your web page. Meta tags should be 100% relevant to the information that the web page is providing. They should include keywords and phrases as that is what a search engine will be indexing when it displays search results. Keep the meta tags brief but informative. The title tag is the most important meta tag that you can use and should be something eye-catching for a reader, while including your main keyword. The title tag will be displayed as the headline in the search results so it is important that it is enticing enough for a reader to click it. Headings tags are usually seen in paragraphs and are used as subheadlines. As part of an on-page optimization, keywords can be placed into heading tags to specify the topic of the following content. Heading tags have many times more weight compared to the normal text so it is beneficial to include as many header tags as possible utilizing the keywords that best relate to the topic. The search engine and human readers will both be able to understand the topic better. Alt tags are used to describe an image or what the user will see when the mouse is over the image. This helps with keyword density and allows search engines to index the image. A meta description is mainly used for people looking at the search results. The meta description is a small snippet explaining the short content of the page. Although the meta description does not hold much weight in the eyes of a search engine, it is essential that it is written to interest the person who sees the search result in order to click it.
Off-Page Optimization
Backlinks are incoming links from another site to your site. The more backlinks your site has, the more search engines like and will visit your site frequently. The most common way to generate backlinks is through article directories and author resource boxes. There are many, many article directories out there for you to submit to. Some are of higher quality than others, so make sure you submit to ones that have a decent Google Page Rank. Some may require you to pay a small fee to submit your article and some may not. It’s really up to you and your personal preferences as to which ones you will use. Remember to submit your article with a link back to your site in the author resource box. This is what generates the backlink to your site. A lot of the times other webmasters will visit these article directories in search of fresh content to add to their site. This can be a bonus for you as it may mean your article will be reprinted on their site and of course, with your backlink in place. This is good because of anchor text. Anchor text is the visible text on a hyperlink. Generally it is colored blue or orange and underlined to show that it is a link. Using the keyword you wish to rank for as anchor text is very important. Inbound links that contain the keyword you wish to rank for will help it to rank higher in the search engines. An example of a link with anchor text might look something like this. “SEO Tips” is the anchor text for the following link, [http://www.mywebsite.com/seo-tips.html]. This would potentially help the page rank for the term “SEO Tips”.
Building backlinks
When it comes to off-page SEO, one of the most important ranking factors are backlinks. Not just the number of backlinks, but the quality and relevancy of those backlinks to the content on your website. The reason backlinks are so important is because search engines use them as a way of “crawling” the web and discovering new pages. They do this by following links, and the more links a page has pointing to it, the more it will get crawled. Backlinks are also an excellent way of increasing a web page’s PageRank. This is a number between 0 and 10 which indicates the importance of a website in the eyes of Google. It is the system Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin designed and it is what they use to measure the importance of a website. The more important the website that is linking to you, the higher your PageRank will get. Not all backlinks are beneficial though, and some can be detrimental to your website’s PageRank. This is why a link analysis for your website and for your competitors is an essential step in off-page SEO.
Guest blogging
As you might have heard, guest blogging is one of the best ways to build links in today’s SEO world. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, guest posting isn’t in fact dead. Guest blogging is an excellent way to reach out to new readers and get your name out. There are 2 types of guest blogging. There are shady guest blogging and legitimate guest blogging. Like most other link building exercises, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. If you’re still using article marketing or using the same article to guest post on many different blogs, stop. The power in guest posting lies in the ability to write a great piece of content for someone else’s site, and in return get a well-deserved contextual link. If you can do this, you’re gold. A simple way to find guest posting opportunities is to Google search for them. You can use any one of these search strings: Hopefully, this will get you a nice list of potential blogs to guest post on. Another way to find guest posting opportunities is to analyze your competitor’s backlinks. If they have a lot of links from guest posts and other off-site SEO efforts, there’s a good chance that these links are natural and around “post penguin”. Finally, you can ask around on Twitter. This has worked for me many times. After you have found some blogs to guest post on, it’s time to move onto the most important part, which is not messing up. Write your best content and take the time to make it great. After your post is accepted and published, it’s ok to send a quick thank you email to the blog owner. This is the beginning of your beautiful relationship with your new blogging friend. Later down the road, you can write more guest posts for them, and even ask them if they’re interested in contributing to your site. This opens up the opportunity for co-citations and developing real relationships with others in your niche.
Social media promotion
Twitter is a great place to promote your blog. If your blog is based on a specific niche, try searching for Twibe communities of shared interests. Spamming your own links is never a good idea. Instead, try to engage in conversations and build relationships. A great strategy is by using Twitterfeed, which automatically tweets new blog entries. Be sure to mix in other content or retweets to avoid appearing as a spam bot.
With an incredible amount of bloggers, it would be easy for your blog to get lost in the shuffle, and the most effective way to prevent that from happening is to promote it via as many possible outlets. But remember to steer clear of any type of “automatic submission software.” Most of these programs will spam your site across the internet and are now regarded as a violation of Google webmaster guidelines. Always remember to keep your promotion white-hat. A simple and effective way to draw attention to your content is by doing nothing more than submitting your articles to popular social bookmarking websites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Simply submit the link and an interesting description, but remember it’s important to be an active member of these communities. Digging and voting on others’ submissions gives your link a better chance of being seen by others. Social bookmarking sites have long been a launching point for viral content. If your submission makes the front page, prepare for a nice traffic spike.
Social media is the buzzword these days. It is increasingly becoming important and is no longer a mere online hub or a community, but it’s evolving as a powerful way of promoting one’s business, blog, or website. With the advent of Web 2.0, blogs and social media have become the new faces of the internet. In fact, some blogs are more popular than traditional websites because of the dynamic content they offer and the ability to connect with readers on a more personal level.
Monitoring and Analytics
It’s also good to keep a close eye on website traffic at the same time, as you will find that increases in traffic often have a strong correlation with keyword ranking improvements.
Once around three months has passed, look back at the original list of keywords and compare it to the current list. You will find that certain keywords have improved, some have stayed the same and some have worsened. Having this information laid out very simply is excellent for understanding which direction your SEO campaign is going in.
A good way to track keyword rankings is with a simple Excel spreadsheet. Make a list of keywords and then every month record the position of these keywords. You will also want to record the website’s URL with the keyword if it is possible, as this will make it much easier for you.
Tracking keyword rankings is important as it gives you insight into the direction of your SEO campaign. By seeing which keywords are succeeding and which ones are not, you can understand your target market better. If you are using a certain keyword and it is not bringing people to your site, you will understand that the keyword is not effective.
Tracking keyword rankings
Keyword tracking is one of the most crucial tools in SEO. You can use either a desktop software or your personal preference would be to use an online rank checker. Using software is a good idea because it tracks many information over time and can produce reports. An excellent rank checker that I have used is Advanced Web Rankings. If you have a small number of keywords that you would like to track, you can simply input your information and the URLs into an excel spreadsheet to easily track your position. By creating a schedule to check your rankings with your selected tool, you can ensure that you are always one step ahead of the game and will keep the page in check to see if it is on the right SEO path. If the page does reach top ranks for the designated keywords, it is always a good idea to keep a close eye on the positions to ensure that they stay there. Be sure to only change one or two variables at a time on your page, because if a drop in rankings does occur, it may be difficult to pinpoint the exact cause. If you are unsure if SEO is causing the change in ranking the next step.
Analyzing website traffic
By analyzing the website traffic, you can find out how effective your SEO strategies are being. There are a number of ways to check website traffic. One of the quickest and simplest ways is to install Google Analytics. It’s as easy as signing up for an account, adding your website, and then adding a bit of tracking code to your page. This will allow you to have access to a wealth of information, including visitor numbers, which pages they entered and exited from, how long they spent on each page, which keywords they used to find your page, your most popular pages, and much more. All this information will allow you to see exactly which areas are strong and which require improvement. If you’re looking for something a little less complex, you could use Statcounter. This tool is also great for determining the IP addresses of your visitors, useful when it comes to promotional activities. A further method could be using an ROI tracking platform such as the one provided by KeywordDiscovery.com. This tool allows you to enter a list of keywords and provides you with a piece of code generating a unique URL for each one. By using this URL in any PPC campaigns, you can accurately measure the amount and type of traffic that each keyword is providing. Once the data is collected using any of the methods mentioned above, it’s time to put it to good use. The basic principle behind using this data is to find your strong points and weaknesses, understand more about the visitors you’re attracting, and then utilize this information in order to increase the number and type of visitors. The easiest place to start is to locate your most popular entry pages as they are what give off the first impression of your site. By strengthening these pages, you will be able to retain more visitors. Now that you have pages for retention, locate the pages with the highest exit rates. These pages are obviously not holding the attention of the visitor and will require modification. Another useful way to retain visitors is to determine the keywords that they are using to find your site and then create more pages or posts related to these topics. The logic behind this is that if these pages were the entry points, then they are what the visitor is interested in and therefore more of these pages will be a visit retention method. By doing this and tracking it, you’re essentially creating an action plan using trial and error to find out what methods work best in retaining visitors.
Utilizing SEO tools
Finally, for analyzing links, OpenSiteExplorer is an effective tool that allows you to check your backlinks and identify linking anchor text.
To track your website statistics, Google Analytics is the most commonly used tool. It is powerful and full-featured, providing a wide array of data about your website in addition to useful data on your keywords and rankings. It allows you to set up goals and track their conversions and also provides information about your site’s speed and SEO optimization. Free alternatives to this are tools such as SEOdity and RankScanner, which are both quite new and are rapidly adding new features.
Utilizing SEO tools can help automate the process of tracking your search presence and checking for areas of improvement. There are many different tools available with varying degrees of usefulness. Many of them are quite costly, but there are cheaper alternatives that provide excellent functionality. To track your search presence, there are many rank checking tools available. Some are software-based; however, the quality of these is questionable. The best tools are usually web-based and provide regular updates on your rankings. Many of them also provide rank tracking for multiple keywords over multiple search engines. A good free tool for this is Google Analytics, which provides a very basic keyword ranking report.
Once you have gotten your SEO techniques off the ground and are actively employing them, it is important to analyze their effectiveness. You may be incurring costs at this stage (e.g. PPC advertising) depending on the type of business model you are using, so it is vital to ensure you are getting your money’s worth. Even if this is not the case, it is still important to understand how effective your SEO methods are so you can continue to refine them and increase your search engine exposure.
