Jun 13
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Because of the sheer size of the archives of some blogs, and the amount of content in blogs, blogs do very well in getting visitors from search engines. In fact, I would dare to say that blogs are one of the best platforms for you to target and capture search engine traffic.
For my own blog here at Blogopreneur.com, I get more than 50% of my unique visitors from search engine traffic, and in a month, I am getting search traffic for thousands of different search terms.
I think it is also useful to realise that search engines bring in the most targeted traffic! Why? Because these people are already searching for information! If your site pops up in the first few results, it creates a perception that you know about that keyword or key phrase they are searching for.
Optimizing for Search Engines
Over the next few paragraphs, I’m going talk about how you can optimize your blog for search traffic. One point worth mentioning is that these points do well for you only when you have the content in your blog. Tweaking the HTML codes alone will not bring in tons of visitors. Compelling content brings in the visitors. Optimizing your blog helps in making it easier for the search engine spiders to come and find out about your blog – and when you make it very clear to the spiders what your site is about, you will find yourself listing better in the results.
Optimization Tip #1 – Let your titles tell the story
One of the most important thing about search optimizing a page – if you’d ask ANY SEO practitioner – is how you title your page. When I mean title, I mean what goes in between your
tags.</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>The title of each web page is like the front cover of a book – if the cover (and the title of the book) does not capture the attention, then nobody will even take a second look at your contents, right? The same goes for web pages.</p>
<p>Search engines work on keywords and key phrases. So in order to attract search engine traffic, you need to put your keywords and key phrases early in the title. So let’s say you blog about gadgets, and recently, a new gadget called “alphazulu player” is released today. In order to target visitors searching for this gadget, you need to put “alphazulu player” in your title, and I would even recommend putting that as the first two words of the title.</p>
<p>This will help in positioning yourself high in the rankings of the search engines.</p>
<p>There is one important thing about titles, and this is especially for blogs. You see, your blog has a title, and then, each post also has a title. Very often the post title is much more specific than the blog’s title. However, a lot of blog templates put the title in the permalink pages in the format of [Blog Title] – [Post Title]. You need to edit your blog template to change it to [Post Title] – [Blog Title]. This will put your specific keywords for each post right up in front.</p>
<p><strong>Optimization Tip #2 – Meta tags</strong></p>
<p>Some may argue that many search engines do not take note of the meta tags of a page any more, because of the spamming cases and keyword stuffing (unethical SEO practitioners stuff these tags with keywords in attempt to rank high for search results).</p>
<p>However, Google, for one, still uses the Meta Description tag. Let’s take an example.</p>
<p><img src='http://www.blogopreneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/meta-description.gif' alt='' class='aligncenter' /></p>
<p>What you see above is one of my posts in the search results of Google, and the line highlighted with the arrow saying “Step by step instructions to install WordPress MU on a CPanel/WHM server.” is what goes in my meta description tag.</p>
<p>So how do you add meta tags to a WordPress blog?</p>
<p>First, you have to add some custom fields to your post. This is done when you are composing your post in the admin panel. There is a section under the main post called custom fields. Use that section to add the two meta tags in – description and keywords.</p>
<p><img src='http://www.blogopreneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/wordpress-custom-fields.gif' alt='' class='aligncenter' /></p>
<p>Next, you have to edit your WordPress blog template.</p>
<p>In the template’s single.php file, add these two lines inside your HTML head.</p>
<p><meta name="Description"<br />
content="<?php echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “Description”, true)); ?>”><br />
<meta name="Keywords"<br />
content="<?php echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “Keywords”, true)); ?>”></p>
<p>Then, you are done! The get_post_meta() function retrieves the custom fields according to what you keyed in.</p>
<p><strong>Optimization Tip #3 – Resolve the canonical domain issue</strong></p>
<p>My third tip for you in optimizing your blog is to resolve the canonical domain name issue. What is this? It basically means you have to choose between a “www” version or a non “www” version for your web site.</p>
<p>You see, most of the time we tell people something like “hey, my blog is at blogopreneur dot com”. There is a fair group of people who will type http://blogopreneur.com and another group who will type in http://www.blogopreneur.com. Notice the difference between the two URLs? Most of the time, the two different URLs will give you the same content, but that is because “www” is configured to be the default subdomain. To search engines, http://www.blogopreneur.com and http://blogopreneur.com are supposed to be two different URLs.</p>
<p>So what happens is that you will find links coming in to both URLs, and you will want to focus all your efforts on one URL instead of two.</p>
<p>To do that, you need to use a redirection service, and more importantly, this redirection needs to be search engine friendly. If you have followed me all the way to using a Hostgator Linux plan, you can easily do this by adding something some code to the .htaccess file.</p>
<p>Here is the code (in this example, bloggingessentials.com is the domain name. Remember to replace it with your own)</p>
<p>RewriteEngine On<br />
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^bloggingessentials.com<br />
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.bloggingessentials.com/$1 [R=301,L]</p>
<p>Remember the .htaccess file that we created before, what you need to do now are:</p>
<p> 1. Download the latest .htaccess file from the server using FileZilla FTP (Do NOT use the empty one in your own computer because WordPress has probably made changes to it when you updated your permalink structure)<br />
2. Open the file in notepad to edit it.<br />
3. Place this code above what you already have in the file.<br />
4. Save the file.<br />
5. Re-upload the file to the server.</p>
<p>Then you are done! What should happen now is that when you access your “non-www” version of the site you will be automatically redirected to the “www” version.</p>
<p><strong>Optimization Tip #4 – Writing your post copy</strong></p>
<p>Another one of the more important tips in optimizing your blog lies in how you write your blog post everyday. Content is king. One of the most important parameters that contribute to a good ranking in search engines is great content.</p>
<p>And you must know how to write well, so the search engine spiders will know how to index your pages efficiently.</p>
<p>Of course, SEO copywriting is a whole course and discipline by itself, and would take days to cover, so for now, I shall just list down some of the points that are more relevant to blogging and blog marketing.</p>
<p> 1. Choose one keyword / key phrase to target per post<br />
2. Focus only one one keyword per post, targeting to many is targeting nothing<br />
3. Use subheaders. You might want to leave one HTML header (i.e. H1 – H6) for subheadings in your blog post.<br />
4. Bold or italicize the text in your blog post to put emphasis on your keywords.<br />
5. It would be good to repeat the keyword 2 – 3 times in the post, but do not do it too much, it may trigger your site to be spamming your keywords. As a guide, just write naturally!<br />
6. When you first start your blog, do your best to keep your links on a page to less than 100. After a few months and when you are sure that your blog is categorized correctly, you can go ahead and add more.<br />
7. Be sure who you link to. Always link to relevant sites. Remember to check your links regularly to make sure they are still intact.<br />
8. Add alternate tags to your images, and you can put your keywords there, but again don’t do it excessively. Again, to be on the safe side, the alternate tags should be descriptive of the picture.<br />
9. If you are linking any files from your blog post, you can name the files appropriately. Again, you may use your keywords in them, but don’t do it excessively.</p>
<p><strong>Optimization Tip #5 – Designing for humans</strong></p>
<p>One mistake that some SEO practitioners overlook when optimizing their website is that after all the optimization for search engines, the website looks horribly plain and unattractive! Well, I don’t know who these practitioners are targeting to read their pages but for my blogs, I want humans to read them!</p>
<p>So while you go ahead and tweak away in your HTML editor, remember to check back in your browser what your blog looks like (if you are a half usability freak like me, you will have to check across different browsers!)… and it would be especially good if you could get a friend who is less tech savvy to give you a critique on your blog design!</p>
<p>Here are some tips to get started with.</p>
<p> 1. When writing your posts, do your best to use short paragraphs. A paragraph on the web might juts be a sentence or two, or as short as one word.<br />
2. Use bold or italics to highlight the important phrases that you want your reader to notice about the post.<br />
3. Use the default blue color for links. The blue color (Hex: 0000FF) automatically identifies with people online that they are links. That said, when you use the blue for links, don’t use it for other purposes and non-links!<br />
4. Do your best to use Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet for fonts. These fonts are installed in different platforms, so the look of your website will be the same across platforms.<br />
5. Use a white background with dark coloured fonts – unless you are a professional web designer and you are extremely comfortable with using the negative effect. Most dark designs either look sucky or unprofessional.<br />
6. Always have a link back to the main page of your blog. Normally, clicking on a logo of a website brings you back home, so do the same for your blog.</p>
<p><strong>Optimization Tip #6 – Write often</strong></p>
<p>I guess I have mentioned this a couple of times now – quality content is king! Search engines love blogs because they are frequently updated. So my best piece of advice is to really write often. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a grandmother story to tell. In fact, we don’t want to hear grandmother stories! What we (and what Google loves) is frequent updates of short articles.</p>
<p><strong>That’s it for optimization!</strong></p>
<p>So, that so much for optimization! Well, I would say that is not ALL you can do, but this is enough to get you started! In the next session, I will touch more on marketing – what you do off your blog to build incoming links, and traffic.</p>
<p>Source: <a href="http://www.blogspreneur.com/">Blogspreneur</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.absensiwajah.com">Absensi</a>: <a href="http://www.absensiwajah.com">AbsensiWajah.com</a></p>
<p class="submeta">written by <strong>Elke Octavia Widjaja _</strong>
\\ tags: <a href="http://www.santaritta.com/tag/blog/" rel="tag">blog</a>, <a href="http://www.santaritta.com/tag/entrepreneur/" rel="tag">entrepreneur</a>, <a href="http://www.santaritta.com/tag/marketing/" rel="tag">marketing</a>, <a href="http://www.santaritta.com/tag/money/" rel="tag">money</a>, <a href="http://www.santaritta.com/tag/online/" rel="tag">online</a><br /> </p>
</div><!--/entry -->
<h3>Related Contents:</h3>
<hr>
<script type="text/javascript">
hopfeed_template="";
hopfeed_align='LEFT';
hopfeed_type='IFRAME';
hopfeed_affiliate_tid='business';
hopfeed_affiliate='ikatama';
hopfeed_fill_slots='true';
hopfeed_height=280;
hopfeed_width=336;
hopfeed_cellpadding=5;
hopfeed_rows=5;
hopfeed_cols=1;
hopfeed_font='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif';
hopfeed_font_size='9pt';
hopfeed_font_color='#000000';
hopfeed_border_color='#FFFFFF';
hopfeed_link_font_color='#3300FF';
hopfeed_link_font_hover_color='#3300FF';
hopfeed_background_color='#FFFFFF';
hopfeed_keywords='computer,business,affiliate';
hopfeed_path='http://ikatama.hopfeed.com';
hopfeed_link_target='_blank';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src='http://ikatama.hopfeed.com/script/hopfeed.js'></script>
<!-- Pings -->
<br />
<!-- You can start editing here. -->
<!-- If comments are open, but there are no comments. -->
<h3 id="respond">Leave a Reply</h3>
<form action="http://www.santaritta.com/wp-comments-post.php" method="post" id="commentform">
<p><input type="text" name="author" id="author" value="" size="22" tabindex="1" />
<label for="author"><strong>Name</strong> (required)</label></p>
<p><input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="" size="22" tabindex="2" />
<label for="email"><strong>Mail</strong> (will not be published) (required)</label></p>
<p><input type="text" name="url" id="url" value="" size="22" tabindex="3" />
<label for="url"><strong>Website</strong></label></p>
<p><textarea name="comment" id="comment" cols="100%" rows="10" tabindex="4"></textarea></p>
<p><input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment" />
<input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="22" />
</p>
</form>
</div><!--/post -->
</div><!--/content -->
<div id="footer">
<span class="mangoorange">
2010 @ <a href="http://www.santaritta.com">Santaritta.Com</a>
</span>
</div>
</div><!--/left-col -->
<div class="dbx-group" id="sidebar-right">
<!--sidebox start --><div id="pages-3" class="dbx-box widget_pages"><h3 class="dbx-handle">…</h3><div class="dbx-content"> <ul>
<li class="page_item page-item-187"><a href="http://www.santaritta.com/about-2/" title="About">About</a></li>
</ul>
</div></div><!--sidebox end --><!--sidebox start --><div id="archives-3" class="dbx-box widget_archive"><h3 class="dbx-handle">…</h3><div class="dbx-content"> <ul>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2010/05/' title='May 2010'>May 2010</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2010/04/' title='April 2010'>April 2010</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2010/03/' title='March 2010'>March 2010</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2010/02/' title='February 2010'>February 2010</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2010/01/' title='January 2010'>January 2010</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/12/' title='December 2009'>December 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/11/' title='November 2009'>November 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/10/' title='October 2009'>October 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/09/' title='September 2009'>September 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/08/' title='August 2009'>August 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/07/' title='July 2009'>July 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/06/' title='June 2009'>June 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/05/' title='May 2009'>May 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/04/' title='April 2009'>April 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/03/' title='March 2009'>March 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2009/01/' title='January 2009'>January 2009</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/12/' title='December 2008'>December 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/11/' title='November 2008'>November 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/10/' title='October 2008'>October 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/09/' title='September 2008'>September 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/08/' title='August 2008'>August 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/07/' title='July 2008'>July 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/06/' title='June 2008'>June 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/05/' title='May 2008'>May 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/04/' title='April 2008'>April 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/03/' title='March 2008'>March 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/02/' title='February 2008'>February 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2008/01/' title='January 2008'>January 2008</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.santaritta.com/2006/12/' title='December 2006'>December 2006</a></li>
</ul>
</div></div><!--sidebox end --><!--sidebox start --><div id="text-4" class="dbx-box widget_text"><h3 class="dbx-handle">…</h3><div class="dbx-content"> <div class="textwidget"><ul>
<li><a href="http://www.icatama.org">Icatama</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.translia.com/">Language translation service</a></li>
</ul></div>
</div></div><!--sidebox end -->
</div><!--/sidebar --><div class="dbx-group" id="sidebar-left">
<!--sidebox start --><div id="text-3" class="dbx-box widget_text"><h3 class="dbx-handle">…</h3><div class="dbx-content"> <div class="textwidget"><center>
<p>
<img src="http://santaritta.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/JESUS+CHRIST.gif">
</p>
<p>
<img src="http://santaritta.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/maneki-neko.gif">
</p>
<p>
<a href="http://www.blogarama.com/"><img src="http://www.blogarama.com/images/button_sm_2.gif" border="0" alt="blogarama - the blog directory" title="blogarama - the blog directory"></a>
</p>
<p>
<A href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/santaritta.com"><SCRIPT type='text/javascript' language='JavaScript' src='http://xslt.alexa.com/site_stats/js/s/a?url=santaritta.com'></SCRIPT></A>
</p>
<p>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://feedjit.com/map/?bc=FFFFFF&tc=494949&brd1=336699&lnk=494949&hc=336699&dot=FF0000"></script><noscript><a href="http://feedjit.com/">Feedjit Live Blog Stats</a></noscript>
</p>
<p>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://feedjit.com/serve/?bc=FFFFFF&tc=494949&brd1=336699&lnk=494949&hc=336699&ww=160"></script><noscript><a href="http://feedjit.com/">Feedjit Live Blog Stats</a></noscript>
</p>
</center>
</div>
</div></div><!--sidebox end -->
</div><!--/sidebar-left -->
<hr class="hidden" />
</div><!--/wrapper -->
</div><!--/page -->
</body>
</html>