Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Blogs — The Absolute Minimum Every Blogger Should Know
SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization or search engine optimizer. The former is the process of improving site traffic for specific keywords and the quality of traffic sent by organic search engines. As the name implies, the latter is the person who optimize site and content for search engines.
The coverage of SEO is broad. According to Google, SEO agencies and consultants could provide these services:
- Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
- Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
- Content development
- Managing online business development campaigns
- Keyword research
- SEO training
Over the next few days (or weeks), I am going to share search engine optimization tips, techniques and strategies for blogs. While the articles will be written with blogs in mind, they should apply to typical web sites as well. After all, a blog is just another type of web site.
Preliminary Advices
Many bloggers and web site owners are looking for the surefire way to rank in Google or any search engines. There are tons of blog posts, e-books and books on the same topic.
Some of the paid information products even claim to be able to help you to raise to the top of search engines in 24 hours. I may not know everything about SEO, but that isn’t true.
Based on my experience, you may be able to rank high on search engines quickly if you are targeting the long tail keywords, i.e. less competitive keywords, or otherwise the search engines wouldn’t be that reliable for information research because anyone can take over a ranking or two.
SEO takes time. You need to be patient. If you expect it to happen overnight, this is not the right traffic strategy for you. Or at least, you should complement your blog promotion strategy with other methods that produce result faster.
A few obvious examples would be pay per click, advertising (media buying) and article marketing.
If You Don’t Read the Whole Series…
… at the very least you should read the rest of this post.
Search engines don’t reveal the exact algorithms they use to rank web pages. Perhaps never will. Otherwise, people would be able to distill the algorithms down into exact steps to rank on any keywords and exploit the holes in the algorithms to manipulate search engine rankings.
Although I am able to rank well and get lots of organic search traffic to my web sites for years, to tell the truth what I do is not based on exact science.
I do a lot of experiments regularly. What I use to build and grow my sites are based on theories that I believe, through testing or by reading books. Trust me, unless the wisdom comes from Matt Cutts, as of this writing the head of Google’s Webspam team, you should trust it with a grain of salt. Even the words you heard from Matt Cutts may become obsolete because algorithms change on a continual basis.
That means, what I read in books are also mostly what people believe or based on their tests. I filter information and use common sense. Sometimes it involves educated guessing too.
What Bloggers Should Do — Basic Search Engine Optimization Principles
While some techniques are clearly beneficial to search engine rankings, bloggers should carry out their search engine optimization plan carefully. While I don’t read SEO blogs all the time, I used to get involved with the topic quite intensively for a few years.
SEO is certainly a topic that keeps changing — and improving. If you decide to drive blog traffic mainly from organic search, you should follow the development and stay up to date by subscribing to at least one SEO blog.
With that said, at the very least, you should implement the following:
- Produce quality content regularly.
- Research your keywords.
- Match content to the keyword you optimize for.
- Learn on-page optimization.
- Use clean and optimized blog theme / template / layout.
- Build inbound links.
- Bonus: Don’t get tricky!
Writing naturally while keeping search engine optimization in mind is often enough to make your blog pages rank quite well, so it is worth pursuing at least the basics.
Return to Blog SEO — Whitehat SEO for Bloggers in a Nutshell.
Return to Blog Tips for a Better Blog — Blog Building University.
