Quick Reminder: Your Basic SEO Fundamentals

Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) for your blog is essen­tial for suc­cess, on any scale. Many new blog­gers tend to be lead into the false assump­tion that once your blog is up on the inter­net, you will auto­mat­i­cally get vis­i­tors, also known as “hits.” Unfor­tu­nately that is never the case.

If your blog is not launched with SEO in mind, you are likely to be very dis­ap­pointed by its ‘per­for­mance.’ Today, I just want to pro­vide you with a quick run-through in what you need to have in mind.

Don’t worry, SEO is not rocket sci­ence like most ‘spe­cial­ists’ make it seem.  It’s a lot sim­pler than it sounds.

Tak­ing a Stance With Your Header.

First and for most, the header or title of your web­site is crit­i­cal.  Make sure it has key­words in it.  Key­words are what peo­ple type in when they decide to search for some­thing on the web.  Say for exam­ple, you sell an article-outsourcing ser­vice; you’ll want those key­words up front and cen­ter on your website.

Quick Tip #1 — Try using key­words on your header tag (or post title) that are dif­fer­ent to the URL Slug key­words. Both these aspects of a post gets looked upon kindly by crawlers, so that slight change just might bring in bet­ter SERPs.

A lot of peo­ple want what is called a “flash” intro­duc­tion to their web site, but it’s not a good idea.  It may look great, but they can actu­ally hurt your chances of get­ting hits. I’ve seen many blogs that take on the fancy flash­ing and ani­mated head­ers, with all sorts of cool look­ing sym­bols. Now, as this might seem like won­der­ful eye-candy; the prob­lem lays when Search Engine Spi­ders come along — they can’t read it.

Quick Tip #2 - Try to manip­u­late your words with syn­onyms to tar­get more com­monly search key­words. By doing this you will still main­tain the mean­ing and pur­pose of your orig­i­nal con­tent, but also bring in more crawler-awareness.

Tar­get­ing your Key-words & Key-phrases.

This brings us to the next most crit­i­cal aspect of SEO. Key­words are impor­tant in all the text of your site, hands-down.  You need to fig­ure out what words peo­ple are using when they are search­ing for prod­ucts, ser­vices, or infor­ma­tion like what you offer on your blog.

There are actu­ally com­puter mod­els that deter­mine the prob­a­bil­ity that peo­ple will use cer­tain search words.  Com­pa­nies like www.wordtracker.com offer a $1 trial of their key­word analy­sis ser­vice for a day or two and that may be all you need to fig­ure out the best keywords.

Quick Tip #3 - Key­words are used strongly, but more and more opti­miz­ers are look­ing at “key phrases” instead of “key­words” where they tar­get com­monly typed sen­tences. Instead of “Adsense” many blog­gers might tar­get the phrase “earn money online using Adsense.” You should try both meth­ods and see which works out bet­ter for you.

Once you’ve got good key­words, use them care­fully in the text of your site.  You can’t just type a string of key­words across the blog because search engines are on to that trick.  Key­words should also be put in what are called your “tags,” which is part of the com­puter cod­ing of your web site.

If you don’t know how to set up tags, a quick Google search will have you learn­ing. Another thing to remem­ber is that pho­tos or images are not read­able by crawlers, so don’t for­get your ALT Tags!

Quick Tip #4 — For those of us that are new to our blog, you might have missed this post called Holy Trin­ity of SEO. If your read­ing this arti­cle with inter­est, then that is a must read too.

Get­ting more Incom­ing Links

Links from other web sites to your blogs are also impor­tant for SEO and even­tu­ally higher SERP.  Try to find web­mas­ters of other sites that have some rela­tion to yours and ask them to link to your web­site.  Most peo­ple are happy to exchange links because it helps their web­sites, too.

I’m not a big fan of rec­i­p­ro­cal link­ing, because it just seems too fake and crawlers don’t seem to like it that much either. The recently pub­lished post here at Blo­gus­sion; 45 Link Build­ing Tips has some great ways in which you can get a lot more incom­ing links to your blog, you should check it out if you still haven’t.

As you can see, there’s noth­ing excit­ingly new in this post but I wanted to just refresh our mem­o­ries. Every now and then we all tend to for­get or even pur­posely over­look the basics, so hope­fully this can serve as a quick refresher.

Lastly, don’t for­get that Search Engines are the way peo­ple find their way to your web­site, so be sure to con­sider how they oper­ate in the design of your blog. This organic traf­fic is extremely tar­geted because the user has pur­posely gone search­ing for a spe­cific term and landed on your blog. Don’t for­get that

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