Blogging Search engine optimization(or SEO), is the process of improving the amount to traffic your blog recevies by purposely increasing ranking in search engines. Being able to achieve good rankings is key to your success when blogging for money.
What is blog SEO?
SEO is not a practice that can be easily summed up. Some people devote their entire profession to learning the techniques of search engine ranking, and few (if any) have ever truly been able to crack the code.
The good news is the that you don't need to become an expert or do massive amounts of research to get your blog ranked well in Google! As a matter of fact, google tells you exactly what you need to do in their webmaster guidelines.
If you skim through their webmaster guidelines, you will discover that good design and content is all you need for successful ranking. Although this is very true, it's somewhat of an overstatement by Google. Yes, you will receive more lasting traffic with good content and design, but these guidelines were published much to Google's advantage. Good content is only a small piece of the pie.
Don't forget that Google is a search engine, and the largest most successful search engine in existence. Their objective is to rank the most relevant, qualify sites, and to provide the most positive experience possible for its users. But sometimes Google's interest conflicts with the interests of the struggling Internet marketer. This is why I recommend observing these three stalwart SEO tactics that
have always proved faithful over the past decade.
1. Add meta tag to your blog
Meta tags are simple snippets of code that tell search engines information about your page. Meta tags always go in the header HTML of your page. If you are using Blogger or Wordpress, there should be an option for you to edit the meta data of your blog.
There are two meta tags that you need to understand for the SEO of your pages, meta description and meta keywords. Meta description is the line of text that appears under the link to your site in search results. If you search the term "Google" is the Google Search Engine, the site ranked highest is www.google.com. If you look above the green Link, and below the large text link titled 'Google' you will see these two sentence, "Enables users to search the Web,Usenet, and images. Features include Pagerank, caching and translation of result, and an option to find similar pages. "That text is Google's meta description tag.
o insert meta keywords in HTML, simply type:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc.” />
In-between the <head> and </head> tag of your pages. If you are using a blogging service like Google Blogger or WordPress, there should be an option for you to change this in the administration.
Note that every single page or post within your blog should have its own unique meta tags. Google praises pages with unique meta tags, and frowns on pages that use duplicate meta tags
2. Take advantage of headlines
This one’s a given. Google, and other search engines, look very closely at headlines to determine what your page is actually about. You can use the <h1> tag to laser target search terms. One problem people have with using the <h1> tag is that it’s too big, and that it affects their page cosmetically. This problem can be solved using a simple little CSS trick, but you should check first if you are able to use custom CSS with your blogging service.
Basically CSS (cascading style sheets),defines attribute for text and content of your page. It can alter the size/look of what your page will display as <h1> text.
To do this, simply type:
<STYLE TYPE=”text/css”>
H1 {font-family: The font you want, e.g.: verdana; font-size: The font size you want, e.g.: 12pt; color: the color you want, e.g.: black}
</STYLE>
Into the head of you page..
3. Build honest links to your blog
It’s no surprise Google rebukes people purchasing links from other sites to boost their site rankings. These are the kind of practices that un-foil all of the hard work Google engineers undergo to produce a search algorithm that ranks relevant, quality sites. In Google’s webmaster guidelines, Google tells us to avoid “participating in link schemes,” and to ask ourselves the qusetions “Does this help my users?” and would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” It’s almost as if Google has ethical convictions about organic site promotion.
At any rate, it does help to obey Google at all times. No, it is not a democracy, its an absolute totalitarian dictatorship and Google is the unquestioned leader. Although it may seem like the tough way out, refraining from forbidden site promotion activities could really help you in the long run. Really, the best way to build links to your blog is by getting links naturally with good content, submitting articles, and building Squdioo lenses.
Ezine is the Most prominent site for article submission, and Helium (a huge community of casual writers) just started allowing embedded links in articles. There are a ton of other sites out there that publish articles for free, and they are all but a Google search away…
As, I mentioned Squidoo is another great way to build quality links to your blog. Squidoo was originally created by a leading Internet marketer who sought to make the process of creating stand-alone web pages easier. It grew rapidly in the year 2007, and has become a necessary tool for search engine optimizers everywhere. Not only can you get great contextual links from lenses (the term for Squidoo articles) for free, but you can also get unprecedented amounts of traffic from individual lenses. This is due largely to the fact that Google had a love affair with Squidoo when it was first created, and has since then rampantly indexed, and ranked pages.
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