The views on search engine optimization (SEO) has been one of the things that has changed in the past few years. A lot of bloggers sit down, type a post, and publish it without even applying any keywords. In fact, there are some that even apply SEO without even knowing it. However, it is usually not enough.
Of course, there are professionals and even plugins for content management systems that can assist in optimizing an article.
For some of the older bloggers, and I mean ‘older’ as in you have been blogging for more than 3 years, you might want to take a look through your posts. It might be a walk down memory lane, but you should check out your posts and see how you can change and insert the keywords necessary to allow the search engines to list your article where it should be.
However, for a lot of bloggers who are newbies…
Here are 7 things you should consider before applying SEO to your blog.
Writing Style. You do not have to be perfect. However, you should write naturally. If you are unsure of a word, look it up in a dictionary. Some people believe you have to write like you are a journalist for a newspaper. You do not. If you are passionate about SEO, then it will come naturally and you may not have to optimize your article much.
Readers. Your readers are extremely important. They are the ones viewing your content and judging whether it is useful or not. They will also be the ones that would turn away if your site is obviously in for just the money. This should be your main focus. The keywords can come in time. You might like to read Reader comment: counting keyword density and worrying about SERP’s by Marko Saric or even Jack Nguyen’s article – Writing For Traffic or Visitors? – Have You Been Doing It All Wrong?
Design. You can have a nice fancy design, but is it functional? Are your readers able to surf your site with ease? If not, you might want to look into revamping it.
Keywords. Keywords should be used wisely and not in overabundance. A lot of people try to aim for posts between 200 to 800 words. This is not a lot of words to work with when playing with keywords. This is why you should write naturally. If you are not sure on the subject, research it before writing about it.
The Article Title. The article titles can have keywords, but like newspapers have to kind of draw in your visitors. It is not uncommon that when a person goes to purchase a book, they are looking at the title and cover first. So – make your title pop. You can still use keywords, and write a naturally sounding title.
The Article’s URL. Because of the wonderful technology of some content management systems, it is possible to use “pretty permalinks.” While an article’s title might be longer, the URL can be optimized for keywords. For example, Joost de Valk talks a lot about WordPress SEO. Even though he has a subheader, he put ‘WordPress SEO” as keywords in his URL and his title. Of course, it was a simple decision, but he could have put WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog, but he did not because it was much more important to draw in people looking for that term. (By the way, you should read Joost’s guide on WordPress SEO.)
Linkage. A lot of people know about different link programs. You can exchange links, and join web directories, but you can now do more than that. You can write article that might be related to other articles written by other bloggers. You might get a link back, and maybe a new reader!
Are there any other things people should think about when applying SEO to your blog? Or even to your site in general?
Hi Nile – Such a well written post! For people just getting into blogging, SEO is very important for users to find your posts organically in the SERPs (search engine results page) of Google, Bing, etc.
Many WordPress themes will allow you to change our permalinks for better optimization but it's your job to find the right keywords to use in your title and body.
Once you get these in place, start commenting on other blogs to build brand awareness, traffic, etc. As your blog matures and you keep adding more pages to your blog, your posts will begin to get indexed faster by the search engines.
Do all these while keeping your readers in mind when you write will make this a deadly combination 😉
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I have explained some of this in the past on other article, but a lot of people still do not catch on until they see it a few times.
I think a lot of people get distracted by the money and think that if they write, everything will fall in place. Unfortunately, for them it is not simple. I have seen a lot of businesses as a web host start up and fail because they never took the initiative to learn more to help their business along by applying SEO and social media techniques.
I have a question. My blog deals with programming tutorials, and the website it's attached to is for my web design business. I recently took like a 10+ drop in the SERPs for the phrase "web design tyler tx" , and I'm wondering if it's because my blog doesn't mention "design" very much. Google webmaster tools says my #1 keywords are php, xhtml, and css, and those come from my blog.
If the blog is causing the keyword problem, how do I fix it?
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This is can be fixed with a little anchor text of your keyphrase "web design tyler tx" in one of your post and it would be good to have that term in one of your post title. Also, you can write a few articles and submit them to Ezinearticles, make sure you have keyword phrase in your author resource box below the article to redirect to your blog.
Try this and get back to us and let us know.
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Thanks for response, but it feels like putting "web design tyler tx" in my post would be really random and unnatural. My blog deals more with programming, but there are like 0 search results for programmers in my area.
But I did change the links section of my blog that shows up on all the pages. I had the anchor text as "mccullough designs" and I changed it to "website design tyler texas". We'll see if that works! Thanks again.
My recent post Removing punctuation and spaces from a String in C++
While it might seem unnatural, people do not always put full phrases when they search. There may be some people who will solely look up "web design tyler tx." I have done article rewrites and there are a lot of people looking for specific information rather than just the broad term "web design."
If you would like to be more natural, you could write "web design in Tyler, TX."
Seo is everything that can be searched Google,Youtube ,article directories,Squidoo,link directories. Your content must be really focused, you should know exactly who your audience is by demographics.
Hi There,
Nice study about SEo. I think Keywords and Design are main thing that can Rock your blog.
If you have better contents with selected keywords but your blog is ugly then its not worth ..
SO Design and Keywords are the main thing that we should give attraction 🙂