SEO Tips For Blogs

SEO tips for blogs

It takes a while to get a decent amount of traffic from the search engines. Generally, the search engines do not like NEW websites. They like more established sites that have a lot of people linking to them, proving they're reputable. This is why getting links from other bloggers, directories, other websites that have good reputations in the search engine's is very important.

As your blog begins to grow by having more pages and more links, the search engines begging to send you more and more traffic. This is a good thing! But they're often wary of new website, so time is your ally when it comes to the search engines.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a science/art (depending on who you ask) that focuses on getting your website or blog to the top of the search engine listings. Being at the top of Google's results for any decent keywords can be a great source of traffic and the greatest part aout it is that it's FREE TRAFFIC!

I won't get deep into SEO here. There are far more thorought books about it (for instance, SEOBook.-com), but as your blog grows, try to learch more about it becuase it will onlyu help you. Just like most of the things you'll learn while blogging, you don't need to be an expert at it - just having a working knowledge will provide great results.

The thing to remember about the search engines (especially Google) is that they're trying to create a perfect system where any searchers can find exactly what they want.

  Google wants to display the most relevant websites. It will never have a perfect system, but it probably won't stop trying. If you can keep this in mind, it helps when you're trying to optimize your blog.

don't waste your time trying to trick the search engines, they will figure it out and punish you for it. Just focus on making it very clear what your website is all about and writing worthwhile content for your reader, and the rest will take care of itself.

So, let's get to some SEO. Thest are some of the most important pieces of SEO that every beginner should know. If you do these right, you're that much ahead of most people who don't know anything about SEO.

1. Title tags

This may be the single most important part of on-page SEO. The title tag of your website is what shows up in the top of the browser window. It is also one of the most important factors the search engines use to determine what your site is about.

singapore-title tag

In the above picture you can see that the title tag is "singapore" You WILL want to make sure that your titile tags contain the kwywords that you want to rank gigh enough in the search engines. If your website is about rock climbing, you will not want to have "welcome to my blog"in the title tags. Something better would be "Rock climbing 101 | the best rock climbing techniques."

2.Anchor text 

Anchor text - the text that people use when linking. For instance, if I created a link for a great search engine, you can see the link goes to Google. "Great search engine"is the anchor text. The anchor text is a big deal, because it tells the search engines what other sites say your site is about. Google pays attention to what words are in the anchor text. Obviously, you can't control how other people link to your site all of the time. But, for those times that you can, use variations of your keywords when possible. Linking to other pages and posts on your website, directory submissions, blog carnivals and your signature line in forums all my be good places to make sure you can work your keywords into your anchor text.

3.Keyword research

If your're trying to get traffic from search engines, it's always a good idea to know what people are searching for before start writing. I often use Aaron Wall's keyword tool and run some keyword ideas through it to get estimates of how many people are searching for them.

4.Get links

You already know the importance of links coming into your blog. Getting links to your blog is still the single most important factor in gertting traffic from the search engines. Other than the great benefit they paly in improving your search rankings, they also send visitors to your site. It's  obvious benefit but often overlooked by people focusing on SEO. If you get a link from a blog that gets a lot visitor, you could see a huge traffic spike. If you get links from lots of blogs, you can and will see visitors coming from most of them. Maybe not a bunch, but as you get more links, you will see more visitors. The bottom line about link-building is that you have to creat something great that people want to link to. If you can consistently do that, many other things will fall into place.

Think about the whole process as building a house one brick at a time. And get excited earch time you add a brick becuase it's slowly growing into the structure, and that brick is most likely going to remain there for years to come.