Search engine optimization’s importance should never be overlooked if you want to improve the readership of your blog, especially if the blog’s supporting your online business marketing efforts. Definitely, you’d want your blog to be discovered when certain keywords or keyphrases pertaining to your industry are used to search for information.
Aside from making your blog a site to behold (pun intended), you can do a few tweaks to make your blog stand out from the crowd. Why do you want attention for your blog? Have you forgotten that more targeted traffic can mean more chances of earning, either through getting more leads for your business, getting more people to sign up on referral programs you’re a part of, or getting clicks on your ads?
So, here are four tricks that will give your blog the search engine traffic it deserves:
1. Get Links and Get Linked at
Link building is one of the most popular way to get more search engine love. And this can be done in a wide variety of ways, you can keep on writing linkworthy posts which are usually how-to’s, writing strong opinions that deserve conversations, concoct unbeatable 101 lists, tips, or how-to’s of almost anything imaginable AND useful AND relevant to your blog. You can do quick links blog posts every now and then highlighting links to posts from other blogs that have topics relevant to your blog’s theme. You can also write reviews to get backlinks just like what TylerCruz, EarnersBlog, and JohnChow offer.
2. Use long tail keywords.
Long tail keywords are sets of words typed in by search engine users when they look for certain information. Dozens upon dozens of tools can be used to track long tail keywords. Here are three of my fave blog analytics tools:
Sitemeter’s Check Visitors “By Referral” section will show you what keywords your traffic keyed in to get to your blog. Google Analytics‘ Search Engine Marketing “Overall Keyword Conversion” section is the equivalent of this feature. While Mybloglog’s is Where Readers Came From “Search” section.
Take note of these long tail keywords and mention these keyphrases every now and then to keep your search engine placement for these keywords sturdy. Or if you can, write comprehensive blog posts for the keyphrases that your blog was found through if they are relevant to your theme but you don’t have any noteworthy information about them.
3. Enrich your blog titles and URL’s with keywords.
The more the blog titles contain the searchable keywords that summarize the post’s content, the better to get your blog some eyeballs. How do you know they’re often being searched for? Use free keyword suggestion tools such Overture and WordTracker. Also, make sure you get to work on your URL’s to make them pleasing to the eye of the search engine spiders, too. Brandon Hopkins showed how the Wordpress Post Slug can be used to get the some great SEO results.
4. Use and Optimize Images
Aside from making your blog visually appealing, images can also be used to help in your SEO efforts. Here are a few tips on how to optimize images:
- If you are using Wordpress maximize the title tag feature when you upload images. Keyword suggestion tools can also help you what descriptive keywords to use in labeling your images.
Here’s an example of an SEO feat that one of my own blogs has conquered :-DÂ with the use of images. The screenshot on right is Google’s search engine results first page (SERP) for the keywords (underlined with red) I placed on the title tag of the logo image I used on one of my blog posts. Of course, this also depends on the size of competition or the number of sites vying for a nice SERPs placement for that certain keyphrase. But if you monitor that your blog gets indexed (shown on SERPs) quick enough, say just a few days right after posting, there’s a great chance that you will earn a great spot on the SERPs a.s.a.p. if you do your homework on what keywords to use. But don’t overdo it to the point of keyword spamming as your blog might get penalized and run out of traffic from search engines.
- Don’t upload posts that are too large that it becomes a drag to download your blog which has them. It will annoy readers.
- If the images you use are your own, learn how to get credits and traffic by using some simple image editing skills.
- Google also suggests one way to get your images optimized well for their search engine, opt-in to their enhanced image search.
I hope those blog SEO tips will help you in making your blog attain the attention level it deserves both from the readers and the search engines.
Â
Here are more great sources of SEO tips for blogs if you’d like to read more:
[image from .scooter]
{ 6 trackbacks }
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great point about making good use of the alt attribute on your images. Search engines definitely index that and often put almost as much weight on that as on the rest of the text on the page.
Also, it looks like you’re missing a few words toward the end:
Google also suggests one way to get your images optimized well for their search engine, opt-in to their (?).
I hope those blog SEO tips will help you in making your (?) attain the attention level it deserves both from the readers and the search engines.
Thanks for the heads up Shane. I’ve edited the statement.
These are great tips! Technorati is also a good resource to find out what the popular searches are in your blog theme…
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! sjdpfvbxwt
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce