SEO is absolutely essential for anyone who has a blog. SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is what will make your blog all the more searchable and locatable on search engines – meaning that you will get more visitors, which means more business.
Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be a guessing game; fortunately, there are a number of different tools and services out there that will help you optimize your blog so that you are getting the best search results possible.
Why Should I Care About SEO?
If you don’t know why you should care about search engine optimization, it’s definitely time to start learning about it.
When you want to search for something online, where do you go? To a search engine. Search engines are exactly what will bring people to your blog – if you use proper and effective search engine optimization tactics to make it locatable. You need to learn just how your website will be indexed and ranked in order to understand how to optimize your blog.
In this article, we’ll talk about both offsite techniques for making your blog all the more searchable, as well as the onsite techniques.
Offsite Techniques For SEO
These methods will discuss factors that are outside of your actual site which will have an impact on your blog’s ranking in search engines.
Inbound links are definitely one of the best ways to start generating fresh traffic to your blog. Links that will point to a website will help you climb up on search engine result pages, meaning you will be more visible.
Putting it simply, every single link that is not on your site and which leads to your site is somewhat like a vote of confidence towards your site. It increases its validity, which in turn increases its value, which in turn increases its position on search engines.
The best inbound links that you can have will have three qualities:
- The sites on which the links are posted are higher ranked
- The sites are relevant to the topics that you blog about
- The sites will link to you using keywords that are relevant to your page
So here’s the next important and pressing question: how do you generate inbound links? There are actually quite a few different ways:
Notify Other Relevant Bloggers About Your Site
Spamming isn’t highly recommended here, but if you start seeking out other bloggers who have similar interest to yours and you gradually introduce yourself to them, then you may very well have an inbound link. The best way to build up a rapport with another blogger is to offer to link to their blog, and they to yours. If you also write a good post on a topic that you know is if interest to them, you can throw in a link as a sample of your work.
You Need Quality Content
Adding further to the topic of content of your blog, you need to have content that’s worth reading. If your content is stuffed with hyperlinks and is clearly keyword spammed, then no one is going to want to read it. Write information that is correct, that is helpful, and that is interesting.
Submit To Directories
Another good way to try and generate those inbound links is to submit your blog to a directory. There are paid and free directory services, all of which will help make your site more visible on the web. Compare what each directory can do for you before you decide to shovel over any cash to a directory company.
Do A Link Swap
Why not swap links? As mentioned earlier, if you create a rapport with another blogger, you can then swap links and support one another’s sites. This link swap may very well come about organically and with you both enjoying one another’s content and wanting to share it. Or, you can very well send an email – or receive an email – asking to link swap.
Link swaps tend to be rather effective, but there are some rumors about search engines being able to track the link swapping strategy, which would then devalue the links. Do your research before counting on this method of search engine optimization.
Onsite Techniques For SEO
There are a lot of techniques for onsite SEO that can work for you. We will start with the most obvious and work our way from there:
Keyword Rich Content
What makes your blog searchable on the web? Keywords. These keywords help define what your blog is and will allow you to optimize it accordingly.
Coming up with appropriate keywords isn’t as easy as a lot of people think. The most used keywords have been bought up by the large corporations, so you will have to get a bit creative and try to figure out keywords sentences or phrases that may be relevant to your blog. Some great tools for these are Google Analytics and the Google Keyword Tool. They’re both free, so they are both definitely worth trying out.
Recommended: Google Analytics and Google Keyword Tool
NOTE: One important thing to point out is that stuffing articles with keywords, while it may improve your search results, just isn’t worth it for your website. You need that quality content to keep people coming back. Otherwise, no matter how high your site may appear on Yahoo! or Google, no one will swing by your site.
Themed Blogs
A lot of people truly believe that having a lot of pages that relate to the same theme will help increase your rankings on search engines. Your blog should already generally be about the same sort of theme anyway, but a theme will help a search engine more easily decide where your blog belongs.
Site Design
Site design does play a role in how searchable your website is. Sites that are nicely laid out, that are well coded and easy to navigate tend to fare better on search engines. Flash animation and Java Script don’t tend to help you for search engine searchability at this time, but some people suggest that imbedding video that they have created or that is off of YouTube will help improve search results.
This article was originally posted on Blogpress.
