Friday, October 19, 2007

4 quick basic SEO Tips for Blogs

Originally conceived to be something like an online journal for individuals has become yet another tool businesses can use to market themselves online. Web logs or blogs are now being used not just for the sheer purpose of writing, but also as means SEO (search engine optimization) experts use to increase a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERP).

The Biggest thing about having and maintaining a blog (also known as blogging) is that anyone can blog. What will make one blog more successful than most? simply a keen sense and knowing its target readership. Of course, it will not harm the blogger (a person maintaining a blog) to possess a few basic skills navigating the Internet and creating links to other websites and blogs.
Those basic html skills.

Bloggers today are finding that they can not only write and publish their thoughts for free, using free blog platforms, like blogger, or tumblr or wordpress, but also can find themselves making money blogging by writing on their blogs, or places like ehow.com that allow you to earn money as a blogger by submitting articles.

One of the techniques in blog SEO is to create content that is keywords rich , which is basically what search engines look for in ranking web pages in its SERPs. (very basic here, bear with me)

That said, here are some tips to make your next blog an effective SEO tool.

1, Choose a Theme (and Stick to It)
Most blogs never gain a real readership because it simply is a mishmash of a writer’s thoughts, with very little coherent theme to bind the entire blog together. If the blogger does it for the sheer purpose of a journal, there’s really nothing wrong with that.

However, as an blog SEO, a blog has to have a theme and be themed that will tie all the posts (individual articles) together. This is because instead of just looking for keywords, a search engine will also assess whether the page just happens to have a lot of keywords mentioned in the post or whether the entire blog is about the topic it is searching for.

A good tip
is to place your keyword in the title of the post as well in the content body of the post.
The former will rank less than the latter in the SERPs. Given this point, it will do you well to pick a theme that you are interest and won’t tire of writing about.

2. A Place You Can Call Home
Working alongside the idea of a themed blog, When creating your blog (whether with your own domain name ie make money blogging or a free blog site, like this one here), give it a URL that has the keywords words related to the theme. For example, if you are going to blog about bonsai making, try to use words that are related to that in your blog’s URL (such as www.bonsaienthusiast.com).
Name your blog using words that are relevant to your theme as well. Search engines look at these things as well to determine how high your blog could possibly rank.

If you are blogging on a hosting site, it is possible to have your blog delegated into a proper category. This will help make a search engine easier to find your blog given that the category is strongly related to themes and search keywords. Squidoo is a good example of this.

On a related note, your individual posts should also be titled with words that are closely related to your theme. Again, working on a blog with a bonsai theme, one post could be titled “Miniature Trees: How to Get Started” while another one could be “Selecting the Right Pot for a Bonsai”. This will give your posts a URL that is rich in keywords, which helps in a page’s ranking on SERPS (but you already know that, right?).

*Special Note: Industry experts always recommend looking into all available options to determine the best value. One way to do this is to use a comparison service like Aaron walls Seo Book and Tools (Recommended)


3. Link And it Shall Be Linked Unto You
Another thing about blogs that SEO experts are finding to become a great advantage is the fact that blogs make it easy to link to other blogs, which in turn makes it easy for other blogs to link to you.

This is yet another criterion a search engine uses to rank a particular page in the results pages. The more incoming links it possess about the keyword in search will increase ranking status because the page shows that a lot of people think what you’ve written is a good source of information.

So when writing on your blog, be sure to take the time to read other people’s blogs and other online articles related to your theme. Create links to them so that you point your readers to more information. This will increase the chances of other people creating links that will point to your blog.

4. Keep it Coming
Since blog content is so easy to create, search engines scour blog sites very regularly. That means if you keep on creating new content on a regular basis, search engines will have to keep up with what’s new on your blog.

By regularly creating fresh content on your blog, search engines will tend to look to your blog first before others that are not maintained and renewed as regularly as you do. It helps in the rankings as well, which is the whole point of this article, right?

These tips are just to get you started on using a blog for SEO. As you go along, you’ll find more tricks of the trade that will help you push you up the ranks on SERPs. Of course realistically, don’t expect to rank on the top 3 pages on your first try. But give it a few weeks. And for as long as you keep to the tried and true principles, it may not be that far until you’ve captured a good ranking for your blog.

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