There are a ton of articles and site’s dedicated to search engine optimization out there on the internet right now. The majority of them have no clue what there even talking about, and their pages were created for adsense. What’s sad, is that some of these pages out of sheer luck, are ranking fairly well, and not because of their SEO practices. I emailed 30 various blogger’s who ranked on the top 10 pages of Google asking to explain a little bit more in depth on what they discussed or just asked some general questions about the topics that brought me to the page. A little over half of the people responded, and I never heard from the other half. The one’s who were responded were nice, yet seemed to give dictionary responses. What I mean by this is if I asked a question, they answered with bare general information that can be found anywhere. When I asked an advanced question in a chat with a few of these blogger’s, all of them had no idea what I was talking about. Now I’m sorry, but if your going to rank at the top of Google, let alone for a term like SEO, wouldn’t you think you would know your stuff just in case someone called you out on it? I know I would want to. I really love how people can pump out hundreds or thousands of pages a year of mostly either irrelevant or useless information and still rank high in the search engines. In any case, I am by no means saying I am an SEO master, but below I have included 8 tips for people who are just beginning blogging. And as I said before I am no master or “guru” just stating some things that I noticed, hoping it will help someone.
- Content should be your number one priority: Let’s be honest, you go to a web site and there are a ton of useless articles, or articles that are poorly written. Chances are that if this is the case, you will never go back to that site. This changes though if you head to a site that looks like the owner or the authors put a lot of time and research into the article your reading. No matter what you do, your first priority should be your content. Not how pretty your page is, or how everything is laid out, or what most people do is figure out how there content is going to fit around there ads. This is never going to work, and your site will probably never go anywhere. Now I am not saying that it won’t because I guess anyone cause make a site with 100,000 articles and claim tens of millions of page views and probably make a killing with adsense out of sheer numbers. But honestly, what’s that point if all your doing is throwing down some gibberish that’s not going to help anyone? Quality content that helps people will quite often draw a reader to want to share whats been written. They tend to do this by linking to your blog from their own site or blog, and look, there goes another link to your site. Number 1 in Google here we come.
- Make logical assumptions about what people will be searching for: We all know hundreds of millions if not a billion people use search engines every day. If you hope to even get a fraction of that traffic, you need to be able to make a best possible guess as to what they will be looking for. It takes a better understanding of how people search and what words they use so you can use those words and words like that in your post. Could you ever hope to see any traffic if you have an automotive site and have a ton of keywords about milking cows?
- Titles are your selling point: Major search engines pay particular attention to titles of articles, so this means you should too. It’s always important to have relevant keywords in your titles, as well as what you think your user may be searching for. Both of these methods should help bump up your actual rankings for their searches significantly. Also, make sure your blog put’s the title of your post into the pages title tag, most platforms, this can be done automatically. From an SEO standpoint, don’t put your site’s name into your title tag, it dilutes your keywords.
- Keywords in your post: Make sure after you figured out your best guess to what people are going to be searching for and what your article is about that you use appropriate keywords. If you use more non-relevant keywords in your articles, you’ll be more apt to get hit’s from unrelated searches than what your article is actually about. Yes it’s a hit and another visitor, but people tend to get upset when there searching through Google to find one thing and end up clicking on another. You want people to find your blog useful and informative and link to it, not to just click off and 10 seconds and never see it again.
- Link to your own posts: I don’t know how many sites I have visited where there’s like 40 or 50 articles in the side bar. Some are listed as popular posts and some as favorite articles. This is all well and good but it makes your pages look cluttered. Personally, I set my limit at 5 which one day I may decide to increase, but at that point, I will never let myself get above 10 articles. Try and pick your ten highest viewed articles. Why would you want to do that? Well think of it this way, if you are choosing your high view articles, people are already reading them from the search engines. Seeing that article on the list, and if they like it, they may click on one of your other popular articles. And also, if a visitor happens to come onto your site via a less popular article, they would be more inclined to read one of your other posts. Getting them to stay on your site longer and also increasing your average page views. Please, I can not stress enough, do not over do linking to your own posts.
- Links from other websites to your blog: Links from other sites to your own blog are key in SEO, and more than likely you will never get anywhere without some of these links. If you write good content, people will link to your blog, this is an inevitable fact. In the meantime though, try using social media networks like twitter, myspace, and facebook, and use them to advertise via your profile and your friends list. Don’t become obsessed with getting links – what you need to do is become obsessed about writing great content and the links will eventually come to you.
- Plugins I really hate all the back end work that needs done to keep a blog maintained and updated. I suggest doing some research and finding plugins you like and easy to use that will be valuable to yourself and to your viewers by reducing the time spent just doing back end work. This will enable you to spend more time writing and researching your content articles.
- Let your blog speak for itself: With quality content, and a small starting viewership, your blog will literally promote itself. Once you have a few regular readers and viewers, those that like your posts, will link to your site and articles on their blog. And people will add you to there social network accounts and talk about your site and articles there. Most of the time, this generates even more link juice for your site. Think of it like a chain reaction, after the start, nothing can stop you except not posting regularly and writing horrible articles.
All in all, from the time I have spent on the internet, search engines seem to be doing a remarkable job finding useful and relevant content on various websites across the net for any given keyword. As such, all SEO work aside, if you would just consistently write useful and informative articles, there should be no need for much of anything else. Just like the chain reaction I mentioned above, eventually, the traffic would come.
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Nice tips man.