Most traffic for highly successful blogs comes from search engines like Google or Bing. Search engine visitors are more likely to buy products, click on advertisements, and sign up to newsletters. The question is then, how do bloggers get search engine traffic?
Search engine optimization or SEO is how to take your blog from a low traffic site to an optimized high traffic blog. The key is to follow some important search engine rules, use some of the webs most valuable tools, and work on making your content friendly to both search engines and human readers. I have put together a few of my favorite tools and tips for better seo below.
Guide to SEO
In our recent production of the Planning to Earning Guide for bloggers, we created a section of the guide that is completely dedicated to search engine optimization. We have articles about the basics of seo, choosing the right keywords, url canonicalization, and even the holy trinity of seo. Make sure to see all 13 articles on SEO in our Guide to SEO.
Keyword Position Tool
If you are curious about how your current seo is doing or you have made some recent seo adjustments and are looking for ways to check if they worked, just check out the Keyword Position Tool. With this seo tool you will be able to check a specific keyword with a specific url to find the search engine position for the url. This is useful to check both for yourself and your competition to see how to improve your positioning and whether you are moving up on the list or down.
Link Popularity
Another important element in seo optimization is link analysis. Bloggers need to know how many links they have for a given url or address and what the quality of the links are. To do this you can use a Link Popularity Tool. It is quick and easy, just put in your url and find out. Again this is a great tool to improve your own blog or to understand your competition for specific keywords. If you are in the 9th spot for a keyword, check out the 6,7, and 8th spots to see what it will take to overpass them.
Meta Analyzer
Keyword Difficulty
Know whether your competition for a certain keyword will be difficult or if you will be able to become the top url for the search engines. Do this by using the Keyword Difficulty Checker. Use it and the tool will give you a percentage of difficulty. The higher the precentage the more difficult it will be to achieve success on the keyword.
W3C Validation
Blogussion has an article to describe more about W3C Validation and give instructions on why it it is important. The main thing is that if your site is not up to the standards set by W3C then search engines will be less favorable to you. So get your blog up to standard by checking your site with this official Validation Tool.
Bad Neighborhood Link
A bad neighborhood is a link in which your blog is being associated with spam or other indecent sites on the internet. Not only is this not helpful to your blog but it actually damages your blogs reputation with search engines. Use the Bad Neighborhood Tool to see if you are being negatively effected. Note, each bad link should be evaluated as the tool is not as subjective.
Conclusion
Getting lucky with search engines all depends on your ability to maximize the good content on your blog and minimize any problems that may arise from w3c validation or bad neighbors. So go use the tools and read up on how to become better at SEO.
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I had a teacher in high school that absolutely loved the number 7, everytime you said the number 7 or something 7 was mentioned he’d go crazy about it, lol. Anyways… back the topic at hand… From your list of tools, they are all great, but in addition to that list, I also like the free tools Google has available to us =D
Till then,
Jean
Google does have some great tools available like their adwords tool. Just type in Google Adwords tool and you will get right to it. It is a great way to evaluate seo potential.
Great collection of tools! I rely mostly on the SEO in Thesis right now, but I’d like to implement these soon. Thanks! Just added you on Twitter as well!
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Thanks for adding me on twitter and Thesis has a lot of great seo tools built in. The best part about using most of these tools are that they enhance your current seo and content. The tools in most cases are used to help you check how you seo is doing.
Seth´s last blog ..7 Lucky SEO Tools for Your Blog
Hey there,
I actually wanted to ask you guys a SEO question. A while back I switched to using Thesis. As soon as I did that my Search Engine traffic dropped to zero. My main keyword phrase is “lifestyle design”. I was getting reasonable Google traffic with it until I switched to Thesis. I’m using the WP All in one SEO plugin, because of that I haven’t been filling out the tag sheets below each post. Should I be? Will it be doubling up unnecessarily? I really don’t know what I should do. Please help. If you can’t answer me here, please email me the basics I can do with Thesis to improve my blog’s SEO. Thank you. My blog is the one in the link. You can look at it and perhaps see where I’m going wrong.
Thank you.
Gordie Rogers´s last blog ..Productivity Tip: Eat A Live Frog In The Morning.
I think the main issue is that Thesis has all of the features of the All-in-one- SEO plugin built into it. The key is to use their features to maximize the custom build of the blog theme. Otherwise you will be doubling up. All-in-One-Seo is a great tool for blog themes without seo tools, but you should definitely move your seo to the theme’s to enjoy the benefits of increased traffic. Additionally, check to see if you have added meta keywords, titles, and descriptions to both your thesis options and your all-in-one plug-in, if so you are doubling up and that is not good.
Seth´s last blog ..7 Lucky SEO Tools for Your Blog
Thank you very much, Seth. That’s what I was worried about. So, would it be okay to delete my All in one SEO plugin if I use the Thesis SEO forms for each post?
Gordie Rogers´s last blog ..Birthday Reflection For The Past Year.
Right, the only challenge is older posts… but if you use thesis seo forms you are more than great!
Seth´s last blog ..Google Analytics Reveals the Importance of Branding and Content
Right, I’ll start cracking and start from the newer posts through to the older ones. I really appreciate this advice. Will let you know in future if I get more traffic as a result. Cheers.
Gordie Rogers´s last blog ..Saturday Spew and Shout Out: September 26th 2009.
Hey Seth,
Just letting you know that after taking your advice, my website jumped up to page 2 in the Google search engine. Before that it was nowhere. Not even in the top 30 pages. I dumped the All in one SEO plugin and tailorized each posts SEO meta sheets. It took a full two days to gor through all my 50 or so posts. Now, I’m getting traffic again from Google for my keyword “lifestyle design”.
Thank you so much for your help, Seth.
Gordie Rogers´s last blog ..Saturday Spew And Shout Out: October 3rd 2009.
Definitely a great article to bookmark and come back to again and again.
Yes it Definitely is. This way you have some of these great tools available at the touch of a button.
Seth´s last blog ..7 Lucky SEO Tools for Your Blog
Great Collection of tools, am not so familiar with Meta Analyzer Tool so its a good source for me.
Thanks for the post.
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Meta Analyzer is a great tool, so get familiar with it. It definitely is useful for understanding other blogs in your niche.
The best tool for me is Keyword Position Tool. Great tool and you can follow your advance and the successs of your link building campaign. The rest of the tools are pretty useful also.
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Keyword Position tool is my favorite tool for checking on the blog’s current position and future development. I check keywords I am moving well in and then double my efforts to increase the keyword serp.
I think that I’ve use the majority of these tools and I think that my favorite must be the W3C validity tool. While I grant you that it’s been some time since I’ve used a couple of these, the validity tool is “old reliable” in my book…
Validating is extremely important. If your blog is not meeting the standards then the blog traffic will be noticeably smaller!
Seth´s last blog ..Google Analytics Reveals the Importance of Branding and Content
Keyword difficulty is the most important thing, I think. You must analyze it if the keyword is beatable or not. Search a keyword that bring a massive traffic but still easy (or possible) to beat.
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Great tools, all of them are great but the best is the Keyword tool. Always was looking for an accurate tool like this, now i can track down my keywords and make it better. thanks
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Thank you so much for this list! I’ve just used the “Bad Neighborhood” tool and do think there are certain things I have to watch out for; the W3C Validation is a bit over my head, as is link popularity, but I’ll be back to work with those tools. This page has been bookmarked.
Thanks again!
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Great. These tools can really make a difference and you do not need to feel like you have to use or understand all of them right away. Just keep producing awesome content and work on them as you make time and your blog will do fine!
Seth´s last blog ..Google Analytics Reveals the Importance of Branding and Content
Free online webtools to optimize your website or blog. Check http://www.webtoolhub.com/
Nicole´s last blog ..Why is my PC running so slow – Registry cleaners may help
A really great list! Thanks Nicole for adding to the list. Definitely worth checking out…
Seth´s last blog ..Google Analytics Reveals the Importance of Branding and Content
These are excellent tools and many people have no clue that they exist. Thanks for writing about them. Definitely going to tweet and stumble this post.
All the best,
Eren
Eren Mckay´s last blog ..No carve pumpkin ideas decorating pumpkin face ideas
Thanks for helping promote them. I think these tools are essential to eventually learn and master as you progress through blogging.
Seth´s last blog ..Google Analytics Reveals the Importance of Branding and Content
Thanks for sharing with these useful tools. SEO really give me a dificult time but it is something need to be done.
SEO can be difficult, but just make sure to do the basics and then focus on providing readers with great unique content and an easy format for reading it in. If you do this you will be successful.
Seth, I must admin I didn’t know and still don’t know anything about SEO, but your this post gives me something to start from. I hope I will be able to use the tools on my blog which I recently setup. Thanks for sharing.
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The Bad neighbourhood finding tool has really helped me. Thanks for that! But one problem with it is that it shows a link to the Feedburner feeds also as Spam coz it contains more than 100 links.
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Getting rid of bad neighborhood sites will help your blog, but the tool is not 100% accurate as you can see with the Feedburner suggestion.
Very useful tool collection. I have been working on coming up with a more effective set of tools to make myself more productive and these will help. I wasn’t aware of these specific tools previously. Thanks for the excellent post.
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Wow ! Really Very Nice tools.
Awesome post, thanks for the useful tools, this Bad Neighborhood Tool is quite great! It can give quite accurate measurement of what sites you are linking to and if any of those sites have warnings about their content and if linking to them can potentially hurt your site.
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Thanks a lot for sharing such useful tools. I really appreciate you pointing out the bad neighborhood link in the post. It seriously damages the reputation in no time.
I am very excited for you! That is great. The power of thesis is now becoming more evident. Seo is important to have and now that you are not doubling up you will continue to rise.