How To Do Basic Blog SEO

Search engine optimization is one of my favorite topics. It is always changing, so you must stay up to date with your knowledge, and what works for one person might not work for another, so you have to experiment all the time. It is mind boggling how many different variables there are that can greatly affect your outcome.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization is how you optimize your pages to get the best possible rankings on search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Each search engine may rely on different data to rank pages, but the SEO for all of them is roughly the same.

Understanding Keywords/Phrases

Most optimization occurs in places where your keywords and phrases appear. This includes your blog post titles, your content, page title, and links to your page. Keywords are what your page is about. Phrases are basically a short sentence containing the keyword(s). “How to make money online” is an example of a phrase. Phrases are better than keywords because people search using phrases, not keywords, and phrases are much easier to rank for (less competition than using just a keyword).

Optimizing Your Title

The page title (and with blogs, the post title as well) is the most important thing to optimize. Even if you have the best content on the planet, writing horrible titles is a sure-fire way of getting poor rankings. The whole point of the title is to describe what the page is about. The page title is also often used for links pointing to your blog post, so that is yet another reason why it is important.

An example of a bad title is something like “Baking Cakes”, a good title would be “How to bake a cake in under an hour”. It is catchy, and the search engines like it a lot more.

Optimizing The Content

Content optimization is a bit like title optimization - you use your chosen phrase throughout the content. However, don’t go around filling up every sentence with “baking cakes” just yet - there is a fine line between doing correct optimization and spamming the search engine. There isn’t a set rule that says “you must use your phrase every x words”, even one time can be enough to get the desired result. You’ll learn what to do with experience, just experiment and study the results.

Use Search Engine Friendly URLs

Most content management systems will initially make your permalinks look like “example.com?id=1″, but those aren’t search engine friendly. Using something called URL rewriting, you can make a URL look like “example.com/my-post-tile”. Which would you rather use? Not using a search engine friendly URL won’t kill your rankings - but unfriendly URLs make it harder for both humans and search bots to understand what is on your page.
With most systems you can make the switch by changing one or two options.

Don’t Link To Bad Sites And Don’t Be A Bad Site

Linking to spammy sites and blogs can quickly kill your rankings. Search engines do whatever they can to limit the power of spam sites, and they will go as far as penalizing good sites for linking to them. Another thing to avoid is linking out to too many sites, even if they are all good sites. Having too many links (usually over 80 or so) will usually mark your site as being a link farm, thus you will get slapped with penalties.

Do A Bit Of Promotion

While it is very possible to get rankings without incoming links, it is much harder and you will never be able to get high rankings. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to get extra links, just do a bit of promotion. E-mail other bloggers, link out to posts on other blogs that you like, and eventually the links will come.

Be Patient

SEO is a long-term thing, don’t expect results in two days. Usually it will take up to a couple of weeks for major changes to take effect, and it can take up to a month to start getting any real amount of traffic. Sometimes it’s quicker, other times it is slower.

Follow The Webmaster Guidelines

Perhaps the most important thing is follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. By following them you will almost guarantee that your site is legit and won’t get banned.

Stay tuned for more Back To The Basics posts.

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