Top 3 Search engines and their slice of the search market.
As a blogger, you should be considering SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at all times! If you have come this far and still don’t know what SEO is, then you’ll probably benefit from my page with some explanations, here. For everyone else, let’s continue down the road! The article will start with a checklist that every blogger should be able to complete, then an explanation of SEO, followed by some useful resources.
SEO Checklist
- Have you optimised the content of your <title> tags? The title tags are what show up in search results so make sure that you are making them as Search Engine Friendly as possible.
- Are you making custom meta descriptions of your posts? Whilst meta descriptions definitely aren’t as important to Google as they once were, they are still important to readers and visitors. Meta Descriptions are the short descriptions underneath a link in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), so make sure that they ‘hook’ the reader and are as compelling as possible.
- Is your blog description decent? Make sure that the description of your blog is succinct and attractive to the potential reader.
- Have you ensured that your site uses permalinks? WordPress, by default, generates ugly links to your posts (blog.com/?id=3); by enabling permalinks, your posts are a lot more Search Engine Friendly and better for users.
- Have you pimped out your Twitter Profile? There are a number of ways to ensure that your Twitter profile, which you should be using to drive traffic to your blog, is SEO friendly. There is a great article here which should help on this matter.
- Are you making use of internal linking? If there is something which you are writing about and it connects to an article that you wrote previously, then link to it in your blog. Google will also index your site better.
Of course, a lot of the technical SEO stuff is difficult to maintain and edit with CMS’s like WordPress, so it is best to download useful plugins to help do it for you! Personally, I use SEO Ultimate Plugin to give me the power to edit the titles and meta descriptions; don’t worry it is free (like most WordPress plugins) and is very useful. It also comes with a nifty module called the Deeplink Juggernaut which will search for keywords in your posts, and turn them into links to other articles on your blog related to that keyword!
Why SEO is important
If you read through that first part wondering why on earth there is such a big fuss over SEO, then keep reading!
Every blog seeks to have viewers. However, no matter what niche you think of blogging in, there is going to be someone who is already blogging in that niche. This is because people want money, and viewers = money. So if you want to be a cut above the rest, you’ll need to expose yourself. We’ll use a blog about photography as an example. Without any sort of SEO, typing the term ‘Photography tips’ into Google would make your blog on photography show up on probably the 10th SERP. Can you see how this is a barrier to the exposure of your site?
What SEO does, is make sure that the search engines find your blog to be very relevant to photography, and thus display it as among the top 10 most relevant blogs for photography tips. The search engines find your site relevant because in all your links, there is the word ”Photography”; or in all the meta tags on your site, it says “Photography tips”. Another thing which will help you is if there are links on other blogs/websites with the anchor text “Photography” or something contextually similar - and these websites link back to your blog. An example of anchor text is - Blog Design Company. That link would count a lot toward my PageRank if it were on another blog.
Of course, now that your blog is optimized and it shows up on the top SERP for “Photography Tips”, you will get some serious traffic! Try imagining how many people are searching for tips on photography every day and you’ll have a pretty good idea how valuable the top SERP is.
Useful Resources
Here is a list of useful resources regarding SEO. These should give you even more ideas on how to optimize your site for the almighty search engine.
- Webmaster and SEO Resources – A site offering some useful tips in the world of SEO.
- How to SEO your site for Google – An article focusing specifically on optimizing for Google.
- How to screw up the SEO on your site – A good article telling you how website did things wrong and what they should do to improve.
Story, i enjoyed sharing this.
No problem, and thanks for sharing it!
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