SEO, or search engine optimization, is a big subject. After focusing on your content and blog design, you will want to improve your search engine optimization. There is much good advice online about how to do this, but there is also a lot of scams and rip-offs. Unless you are paying for a quality SEO company’s work, you are better off not spending any money on SEO efforts. SEO doesn’t involve any special software, in spite of what all the SEO hustlers say. What it involves is knowledge and work; time is all you need to learn and then implement what you learn.
The foundation of blog SEO is the first Key to Better Blogging: content. Strong, original content is absolutely the best path to strong search results. Strong content that readers want to link to and comment on is your first imperative. But there are other factors over which you have control, especially if you use the WordPress system on your self-hosted blog, because you can use plugins to improve your SEO.
Here are some immediate steps you can take to get a jumpstart on better blog SEO:
- Write strong headlines that include keywords, because your post headline becomes the content of the title for the single page view of that post. The page’s title appears in the title bar of the web browser. Titles are extremely important to search engines. For any Google search, the main link you click on in the results is the text of the page’s title. Think carefully about what you want in your post titles.
- Get a plugin that enables meta tagging of single post pages and static pages, if you use WordPress. Here’s where the Blogger platform disappoints: a lack of extensibility. I use the All in One SEO Pack, but there are many SEO plugins for WordPress. Use these plugins to create better title tags for post pages than just your heading-as-page-title allows. Use them to create good description meta tags for each post page. Description meta tags are often used as the text snippet that appears in search results, so you want to write short, sweet, compelling descriptions that get people to click through.
- Have a sitemap.. You want an XML sitemap that’s friendly to Google and other search engines. The best way to get one that I’ve seen is the Google Sitemaps Generator plugin for WordPress. With the click of a button, your sitemap can be regenerated when needed!
- Create content for people, not search engines. It is people who will make your blog a success by linking to it and visiting it. If you offer compelling reasons for them to do both of those things, then you can rank well in search results even it you do less work on the other aspects of SEO.
- Find good sources of no-bull SEO information. Here some that I can recommend to help you get started:
SEO Theory
SEO Buzz Box
SEO Moz
Graywolf’s SEO Blog
SEO Tips at ProBlogger
Link-Building and SEO from Dosh Dosh
The above list isn’t the least bit comprehensive, but you don’t need a million links. You need good ones.
Your Feedback is Desired
Leave a comment with a link back to a post you wrote after you read this. Tell me if you applied these concepts to your blog. At the end of this series, I’m going to pick the best examples and link to them. So please leave a comment below and subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of them! Tomorrow is the fourth key: Social Engagement.
6 Comments
Hi Michael, great post series you’ve got going here. I presume you’re considering submitting to the 31 Days to a Better Blog post series over at ProBlogger?
@Skellie:
Pro-who? Just kidding. I’ve been a long-time reader of Darren’s blog. When he runs stuff like this, I often participate where it’s a good fit with what I’m doing. Thanks for stopping by and commenting, and please do check out the rest of the series.
Thanks for the tips, I’ll try some out and let you know how it goes.
Hey Mike,
I have been feeding off your site for a while now. Can’t seem to get off it….
I started doing a few things to my blog and I did just as you had asked me to.
1. I started writing some posts with simple, clear and attractive headlines that also include the keyword. I don’t know how to track the effectiveness of the headlines though! Any input on that one?
2. I am lost on the Meta-tag thing.I am scared to even touch the plug-in you had mentioned.However, I was doing some general research on this and I was asked to type in my blog name on Google and look for “cached” pages. Find the link that says “Click here for the cached text only”, click on it and see if your pages, links and everything to do with your blog is displayed in a “Hyper-link” form. That should tell you how well your site is being dug out by the search engines.
3. I did the sitemap for Google, yes. Let’s see what that does for me.
4. I Stopped worrying about monetizing and earning money from my blog. My focus now is to try and provide some quality content. “Pillar” Content, as Yaro Sarak, of the entrepreneurs-journey.com, puts it.
5.There is a tool at http://www.seomoz.org that shows the page strength of a particular site, I am not going to disclose mine, but it is pathetic - Just started paving some inroads into the dense Internet jungle. One could check it out here at http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength.
I am yet to read up on all those other sites you had provided. I am on to that now…
Meta tags are data in the hidden part of a web page, called the head. The description meta tag is useful for most search engines, while the keywords meta tag is all but ignored by most search engines.
Glad to see you are taking steps to improve your blog. The best content you can create is always the best thing you can do for your blog.
I would also recommend SEO Book. His tools along with his videos are quite helpful.
Matt Cutts from Google recommends Steven Spencer, whose daughter’s Neopets site was so successful she spoke at Bloggher.
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