Search Engine Optimization is a thing that makes many blogger's heads spin - I understand this because every time I write an seo article I buy comments from bloggers telling me the reason is too big a topic and that they'd rather just write 'quality content'.
Whilst I'll never reason that quality content should be anything but a first priority in blogging, truth be told that there are many millions of pages of great writing languishing around towards the bottom of search engines results pages that should be read by many but which rarely begin to see the light of day because their authors have failed to understand that a few simple tweaks in the writing process can see them ranking considerably higher.
So it's time for one more series - this time on Search Engine Optimization for Blogs!
People often ask me 'how will I get ranked number one in (((insert favourite search engine here)))?
My answer usually begins with - 'I don't really know what I'm talking about.but...'
You see whilst some of my blogs rank very highly on different search engines - I often don't define why. Much of what I do is educated guessing and experimentation. I really do read a lot of other people's suggestions about the topic, but the more I read the more I realize that I'm one of many in my guess work - just about any article I read is a 'best guess' of some kind.
My main advice to individuals wanting to optimize their blogs for Search engines like yahoo is to keep it simple. Start with quality content on a specific topic and then tweak it using the best current advice going around.
When I think about SEO for my blogs I tend to divide the things I focus upon into two parts - offsite and onsite search engine optimization techniques. Offsite techniques tend to be about what others do on their websites in linking to you, onsite techniques you have more control over as you write.
Off Site SEO Techniques
Off page SEO Techniques are as the name suggests factors from outside the site itself (ie off their sites) that impact the blog's ranking in search engines. Many of these factors are outside the blogger's control - however they are helpful to know. The most obvious and probably best offsite factor are Backlinks (something I've already referred to above).
It is generally agreed that the links that refer to a website are one of the most powerful means of climbing Search Engines results pages (in reality many argue it is THE the crucial element). - To put it most simply - every hyperlink to your site is seen by the search engines like yahoo as being a vote of confidence within your site.
Ideally Speaking - The very best inbound links have three main qualities for them:
they are from higher ranked sites than your own
they are relevant to the topic you are writing about
they link to you using relevant keywords for your page
Whilst you may not have complete control over who links to you fundamental essentials types of links that you needs to be dreaming of.
How to generate quality one way links?
Of course whilst most of us know this it doesn't make getting such links any easier - its to others in many cases. So how do you get such links?
Quality Content - You can find all kinds of link generating systems out there but in my opinion the best way to get links for your blog is to write quality content that individuals will want to read. You can solicit links web-sites or sign up for different linking programs or even buy text links on other sites nevertheless the cheapest and probably safest approach is to build inbound links in a natural organic way as others url to your quality content.
Notify Relevant Bloggers of one's content - Whilst I don't advocate spamming other bloggers and getting links - I would recommend that if you write a quality post over a topic that you know will interest another blogger who's might be worth shooting them a quick and polite email letting them are conscious of your post. Don't be offended whenever they don't link up, but you might just find that they do and that in addition to the direct traffic that the link generates that it helps constructor your own page rank in the search engines (more on letting other bloggers are conscious of your posts here).
Directories - An additional way to generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. I know of webmasters who rely on the benefits of such a strategy - the first thing that they do when starting a fresh site is to do the rounds of directories - submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords inside links. There are loads of directories on the market - many of which offer a free submission. Ari Paparo has compiled a directory of blog directories that you may want to start with.
Inter-link your Blogs - Increasingly bloggers start or joining blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. An advantage of networks of sites is that they usually link to one another. In doing so you have complete control over how your sites are associated with from multiple domains. It really is worth noting that you must be careful with this approach - if all of your sites are hosted on the one server many think that Search Engines will work out what you're doing as well as the impact will be lessened.
Buy Links - Many professional web masters have a budget to purchase links from other highly ranked and and relevant sites. I won't go into this too much here but you might want to read more about it in my recent post On Buying Text Links.
update: I'd encourage anyone wanting to buy links to think very carefully about this. Google have been cracking recorded on sites that use this practice. They can't catch everyone but some have been caught and appear to have been penalized for doing it.
Swap Links - Similarly many bloggers swap links to bloggers. Sometimes this happens pretty naturally (you see someone linking to you so you link back) playing with many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between web owners. I get daily requests for such reciprocal links (I rarely act with them). Whilst there is some benefit in such link swapping I would again advise caution because many SEO experts feel that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the hyperlinks. Some try to get around this by doing indirect or triangulated links. ie as opposed to site An and B doing a primary swap they involve other sites. So A links to C to acquire D (also owned by C) linking to B (also owned by the) - makes your head hurt doesn't it!?! In addition there are a variety of systems around that say they'll manage such interlinking for you - I understand many who use Digital Point's Free CO-Op Advertising system. Personally I am inclined to avoid such schemes this will let you policy of linking to sites I think are valuable to my readers. Whenever they link back then so whether it's.
If you're looking for link exchange/buying/selling programs you might like to look at systems like:
- Link Adage
- Text Link Ads
- Link Worth
On Site SEO Techniques
Having viewed Off site Search Engine Optimization Techniques I'll now turn my attention to examining some of the factors you might want to keep in mind as you build your blog - (or Onsite techniques - things you do on the blog that help build a higher ranking). As with all SEO Techniques there are many of these and a lot of speculation around them all so let me touch on possibly I can:
1. Keyword Rich Content - identify a few keywords for your article that you're hoping can get indexed highly by Google. Don't pick lots of but consider the questions
How do you want people to find this post looking Engines?
What will they type into Google when they want information on the topic you're writing?
How can I find information on this topic in the Search Engines?
What results come up once i do plug these keywords into Google?
Any alternative keywords are other sites using?
The reply to these questions will give you a hint as to what words you'll want to see repeated throughout your article many times.
These keywords will have to be the most common words used in your article. Make use of them in some or all of the following ways:
Keywords in post and page titles )
Keywords in URL of page
Keywords in outbound links
Keywords in bold tags (try do it at least once)
Keywords in heading tags (there's debate over exactly how to use them but it's generally accepted that H1 tags are crucial and that h2, h3, h4 etc tags also have an impact. Having said that I've seen some pages rank very well in search engines without using heading tags. There are many tutorials online about heading tags)
Keywords in image alt tags
Keywords within the general throughout the text of the post - but especially early, in the first few sentences
Keywords in meta tags (they seem to be less valuable nowadays but many still believe they're useful with some search engines
Of course you can go over the top with keywords in posts and let it destroy your content - but when it fits with what you've written tweak it to add the words you are targeting a couple of extra times. Most SEO experts recommend having your keyword density up to between 5-20% - I think 20% is probably bordering on massacring your posts.
One last word of warning and disclaimer on keyword rich content - don't sacrifice readers experience of your site just for the sake of SEO. Yes keyword density might be important in climbing the search engine rankings - but more important is that your content and design are simple to use and helpful to readers. Nothing is worse than a site that is stuffed with keywords - these websites come off as cheap, nasty and spammy - don't fall for the temptation.
2. Themed sites - One of the growing theories of SEO is you are more likely to rank well if you have a very substantial amount of pages on a similar theme. ie a market topic blog will probably rank higher than a general one that covers many topics. Make a blog with over 200 pages of content on a single theme and you'll increase your probability of ranking well as SEs might find you as an authority on the topic. The take home advice here is to keep to some kind of a topic/niche/theme for your blog. It is usually probably another argument for categories and tagging posts that relate together strongly.
3. Site Design - Search Engines like well laid out, well coded and easy to navigate sites. Make sure your pages validate (I need to work on this) and that they are viewable on all major browsers. Search Engines don't tend to like too much Flash, Frames or Java Script in your site - keep it simple and clean and their robots will index your site a lot faster and more accurately. Also try to keep your blog free from dead links (an issue for those of us with older blogs with big archives).
4. Interlink your blog - The way Search Engines index your site is to send little robot crawlers for your site to track what you've written and keep to the links. Make it easier to allow them to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely. Most SEO experts advise that you provide some sort of Site Map that means every page on your blog is only a link or two away from every other one. One way to do that for bloggers is to make sure that your category pages come in your sidebars as I do with this blog. Also make sure every page links back to your main page and any other important pages on your site. If you're writing over a topic you've previously written about consider linking as to the you've written before or work with a 'other relevant posts' feature at the base of one's article. You'll see in my menus near the top of the page a number of my key categories and articles. One of several impacts of having them highlighted in this way is that they have become some of the most highly ranked pages on ProBlogger simply because they are linked to from every page with this blog.
5. Update regularly - The harder you update your blog the more often Engines like google will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This will likely mean your new articles could appear in the index within days and even hours rather than weeks. This can be a natural benefit of blogging - take full advantage of it!
6. Outbound Links - There exists debate over how SEs treat outbound links from a blog. I'm in the camp who believe relevant outbound links increase your site's ranking in search engines. I usually link out to quality relevant sites which i think my readers will discover useful and have a little anecdotal evidence that appears to support the theory that this is healthy for the way SEs index you (look at Waynes article on the topic for more info). Linking to sites outside your own blog does mean you end up sending traffic from your blog so you need to count the cost of such a strategy. Note that you would be wise to try to link to reputable and relevant sites to your own page. Also keep in mind this too many outbound could have detrimental impact upon your site. Like in most things in SEO - moderation is the key.
7. Choose your website wisely - there are numerous factors to keep in mind when selecting a domain name. For one you might love to include your keyword in it if at all possible. Secondly you should do a little research to determine if someone else has previously used the domain. This could have both negative and positive impact. If it was a quality site with backlinks you might reap some benefits but if it was a banned spam site you could be banned from Google for some time. One service you might want to use to check on expired domains is Long ago Machine at Archive.org.
8. Register your Domain for a Lengthy Period - a newly released patent by Google suggests that it now looks at the duration of your domain's registration in ranking it. It does this because many spam sites have short registrations along with a longer one indicates that you're constructing a site with substance and therefore are in it for the long haul.
9. One topic per post - the more tightly focused the theme of a page the better when Engines like google come to rank it. Sometimes you will dsicover yourself writing long posts that wind up covering a number of different topics. They might relate loosely but if website positioning is what you're after it could be easier to break up your post into smaller far more concerned pieces.
10. Write optimal length posts - there's some thought going around the Search Engine Optimization community that pages which might be too short can get passed over for higher rankings. I try to keep posts at least 250 words. Of course there are some posts on my blogs that are shorter, but if I'm writing an article that I want to rank well I aim to give it some meatiness in terms of length. Conversely don't make it too long either - because in the process you make it difficult to keep your keyword density up and can end up with a less tightly focused page. Research also implies that longer articles can have a pretty steep disappear rate in readers after the text gets below the 'fold' in order to the end of the first screen of article .
11. Avoid Duplicate content - Google warns publishers rolling around in its guidelines about having the same content on multiple pages. It goes for both multiple pages that you own but in addition pages that others own. This is because a tactic of spammers is usually to reproduce content on many pages and/or to steel content using their company sites. There is some debate over what duplicate content does and doesn't include (for example many bloggers use 'free articles' as content on the blogs - these articles often appear on hundreds and even thousands of other sites on the internet and to me could be seen as duplicate content) - a strategy to adhere to be very careful about how numerous avenues your content appears. I do republish occasional posts (or aspects of them) but try not to do that too much and attempt to add elements which are unique on each occasion how the posts are republished).
12. Ping - services like Pingomatic (there are numerous others too) will ping many different websites for you to notify them that you've updated. In the process you'll also be letting search engines be aware that you've updated which will trigger their robots ahead visit your blog. I'd also suggest pinging Google's blog search tool.
13. Submit your RSS to MyYahoo - submitting your RSS feed to MyYahoo seems to help with getting indexed on Yahoo. Read more concerning this at Getting Yahoo Traffic for your Blog. Some also think that doing the same to Google's Personalised pages may have a similar impact.
14. Quantities of Content - I get into trouble when I write about having lots of content - but I believe its true that bigger sites tend to rank better than smaller sites - whilst it's possible to rank highly with a small site - it's most likely not the norm.. Search Engines will see your blog as more comprehensive the more content you have. You also better your chances of being found in Search Engines if you convey more pages. By no means am I saying just to put up random junk content - be cautious about this - rather work at building a comprehensive and large site over time.
15. Submit to Search Engines - You are capable of doing all the best onsite SEO strategies in the world and still get no where since the Search Engines have not found you to start with. Each search engine has a means of letting it know about your site - submit your URL being included in the index. Please note until this takes time and perhaps a quicker and much more effective way is to get linked to by the site already indexed by the major search engines. I've written a post about his previously at getting indexed by Google.
You might also love to tryout some of the services around that offer to submit your sites to look engines for you - I'd be suspicious of paying for this sort of service though. I not have and seem to do ok.
Again Let me reinforce - the above techniques come out of my own experience and from the things I've learnt from others. I am not saying an seo expert but find that if you maintain your above in mind you can do reasonably well. Don't become obsessed by SEO - if you do you run the risk of forgetting about your reader, forgetting to post quality content and you could find yourself getting yourself into some dodgy SEO tactics that could get you banned from the Search engines like yahoo You're trying to get listed in.
I'll finish here with the addition of that SEO can take time - so show patience. After years of blogging I've was able to build my blogs page ranks and SERPs nevertheless it did not happen over night. Often it seems that no matter what you do nothing works - it may be that the words you're wanting to target are in fact a heavily targeted segment from the internet (consider changing your approach) - or it may just be that there is some unknowable glitch using the SE you are targeting - its a fickle game and something that I'd recommend you don't rely on alone. So yes work with your SEO but also look at the many other methods around to discover readers for your blog.
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