Search engine optimization for your blog

By darcvanilla Wednesday December 2, 2009

Seo

So you want to be famous, influential and popular? Do you have something to say? You want to be heard?
Meanwhile, you are crying that you have no comments on your hard-written posts, little amount of visitors and your website looks like written only for one person – you?
Well… Have you ever heard about SEO – Search Engine Optimization? If not, better become interested before is too late.

SEO – Increasing the traffic for your blog

Search Engine Optimization is simply a professional-sounding term for obvious process to increase and improve the volume of the traffic for your website from search engines like Yahoo or Google, via natural or ‘un-paid’ techniques.

SEO often means doing small modifications of parts of your website. However, those small changes often contribute to huge generation of traffic for your website.

Remember that SEO affects only organic search results, not paid or “sponsored” results, such as Google AdWords. If you have some $/€/£ to spend & great promotion strategy – you may try to buy some paid ad to increase the traffic. Otherwise, read carefully.

Rule No.1: Create adequate, accurate page titles

Look at the examples of the most successful blogs of your interest.

Rule No.2: Participate at related successful blogs and forums.

Promote your site in right ways. Comment other blogs, but write only accurate, value-added comments which will attract potential visitors to your website. Be aware that people avoid checking the authors of comments ‘thanks.great post’-alike. I do it too.

Rule No.3: Advertise yourself on social networks.

Whatever your field of interest, go to the accurate social networking sites.
Post about new content or services, if you are facebook fan, create fan page for your business/blog or a group for your graphic design website. Constantly share your knowledge and answer the questions of your fans. You may link importing your posts to the facebook. To find out how, visit: How to import blog posts to facebook.

Rule No.4: Write title tags with right audience in your mind.

Also, make good use of the “description” meta tag. A page’s description meta tag gives Google, Yahoo and other search engines a summary of what the page is written about.

Rule No.5: Improve the structure of your URL’s.

If you are using Wordpress (who doesn’t?), you have easy job – Wordpress does everything for you.
Adequately, your portfolio page should be accessible under the link like mine www.darcva.com/portfolio .
Still, make sure that your URL’s are made short, reasonable and if there is any need – you can shorten them with plugins, like for ex. this.

Rule No.6:Tag content of your posts

Rule No.7: Invite guest bloggers

Almost everybody loves being ‘an expert’, so you shouldn’t have any bigger problem with inviting influential guest bloggers, who have more experience than you. Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute to your blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to increase the value and reach of your blog.
Be sure that you are creating and directing the person on creating the quality post. Ask them a fresh, intriguing questions about the subject related to their profession. Be original.

Rule No.8: Stay away from paid advertising (until you’re popular)

Let’s face it: No one likes side adwords Google sponsored links. It destroys impression of providing your expertise for free, without money-driven incentives. Your visitors will quickly see that you’re creating your blog for materialistic reasons and may look for other place to share knowledge and learn.

Anyway, if you are just starting your adventure with blogging, you are not going to make worthy business with PPC (Pay per click)

Rule No.9: Be first, write about news

If the topic is hot, fresh and trendy, write about it. Be first. Your website will appear in Google results on high position. And of course, your followers can often relate to your website as source.

Rule No.10: Optimise use of your images

All images can have a distinct file name and “alt” attribute, both of which you should take
advantage of. Describe each of your image accordingly to the content they represent. Avoid names ‘image1.jpg’, ‘image2.jpg’ alike.

Rule No. 11: Find your style

Although Picasso once told: ‘Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.’ Don’t try this at home. Who cares about million the same page with the same content?
Don’t even bother to copy material from some successful graphic designer’s blog.
You won’t attract his visitors to your website.
Also, people will stay loyal to his website (One of the reasons is that they want to use his popularity for their promotion for eg. writting some silly without-added-value comments like ‘thanks. great post’)

Find your style by making mistakes, experiment. Be different or be forgotten.

Rule No. 12:Reveal as much as possible

Again, this relates to the Rule No.11

People loooove being part of your private life. Look at the success of all gossip magazines/websites. Your blog is no exception. However, you have to find fine balance between staying professional and letting your readers know what actually happens in your life. Write about your personal successes related to the topic you write about. Any new won competition? Mention about it.

Rule No. 13: Create expectations and fulfill them

Offer quality content and services. In today’s competitive market, you have no other option than provide outstanding services and great articles. Provide free tips for your market target, share your knowledge, become influential. It’s a win-win deal: your visitors read about the topic, you get high traffic to your website and in consequence, your PageRank looks better.

Rule No. 14: Build a brand

Today everything is a brand. You are the brand who is trying to sell yourself on job interviews. Celebrities are the brands. Your business has to be a unique brand also. Create your corporate identity in whichever way you like. Pink is your favourite colour? Make it a part of your brand. Experiment. See what works, what attracts other people and what make them ‘Run,Forest, Run’.
In my case, I decided it’s going to be not-carrying-in-anything-valuable-silly deviation comments.

Rule No. 15: Make your website easy to navigate

Again, you don’t want people to wonder where the #$%^ they can access your contact details to write you an thank you/offensive mail.
Keep your website structure clean and tidy.
Create general pages like about me, contact, portfolio, popular articles etc.
Also, use heading tags appropriately.

In my blog’s case headings look like this <h1> is:

<h1> The most important part.

<h2> This can be any other subheading.

<h3> Smaller, less important

Create accurate categories for your posts. Make them easily accessible.
Also, don’t forget about XML Sitemap. If you are using Wordpress, you can generate up-to-date XML Sitemap with this plugin.

Rule No. 16: Make use of a free webmaster tools.

Most important search engines, for eg. Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google’s Webmaster
Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites.
Allow your visitors to subscribe to your website via RSS. Feedburner is one of the free providers of RSS feeds.

For more information about SEO, Google prepared great SEO guide, containing some of the most important factors indicating if your blog is to be successful.

I hope above article will contribute to the success of your blog. Good luck!
Do you know any other effective methods for SEO? Which of them had the biggest effect on your website?