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Quick Reminder: Your Basic SEO Fundamentals

Janith — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:29:11 +0000

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

What’s the key to Keywords?

Janith — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:56:16 +0000

In relation to search engines, these are simple the words (or phrases) that the user is searching for. If the keywords occur in your pages you stand a good chance of turning up in the search engine results for that particular search. If they don’t, you won’t. Simple!

Keywords can be used extensively to really help your SERPs, as it is one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization. This short guide will explain, in-detail, every part of it. Dominate the ranks, and rake in the targeted Search Engine traffic with these simple tips!

Why should you bother about keywords?

As you should know, keywords are important for non-human visitors to help rank and identify your website. When SEO was in it’s early days, you could barely satisfy both humans and bots, because “keyword stuffing” was the only way to notify the spiders of your content.

However, today the bots are much more smarter and easier to ‘feed’ your information to, they can manipulate text to produce a detail description of your website. Keywords are an important aspect of SEO, and just by following this short guide – you will have your website flourishing with Search Engine traffic.

Identifying Search Terms

Start by considering the sort of terms people would type into a search engine to find a site like yours. For example, if you have a website about console gaming – then your visitors are likely to type terms like “gaming”, “console” or “next-gen”.

Once you have accomplished a few key terms that relate to your site, you should run them through tests to see how ‘popular’ they are. Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool is great for this, as it gives a rough estimation of how many searches are performed for that exact term/phrase.

Implementing Search Terms

Once you have decided on a core set of search terms, you need to ensure that they occur in your pages. You need to make sure that throughout your content, you use the exact keywords you’ve targeted before. They must be identical to your research, even when it comes to punctuation.

In an attempt to implement keywords, many bloggers tend to abuse it, you’re meant to ‘sprinkle’ your content with keywords not flood it. If you swamp your page with keywords (e.g. repeating “SEO tips” 500 times) then you are far more likely to harm your SERPs than improve them as the search engines will regard it as spamming.

What is “Keyword Density”?

This phrase refers to an “optimum” ratio of search terms (i.e. phrases people are likely to be searching for) to page content. If your text has a good smattering of such words or phrases you will be looked kindly by the search engines. However, this again goes back to many bloggers and web-developers abusing this technique and actually hurting their SERPs, just keep that in mind.

Optimum Keyword Density

Unfortunately there’s no such thing; or if there is no-one outside of Google knows the formula! As ever, my advice would be to take a common sense approach, and always write you copy for human readers first and foremost.

So, if your site sells widgets, it makes good sense to ensure that the word widget appears several times – but not too often, where your visitors get sick of seeing it.

Working with the ‘Meta Tags’

There is actually only one tag, but it gets referred to a lot in relation to search engine optimization – erroneously for the most part-simply as “meta tags”. For example, “meta description” is the tag with a name attribute “description”. It looks like this;

What are Meta Keywords?

Meta Keywords was designed to allow you to provide additional text information for crawler-based search engines However, these days virtually all search engines ignore the tag; the consensus is that it’s not worth bothering with.

Frankly, since I got to know that search engines completely omit this attribute of the Meta Family, I’ve totally forgotten about it. In fact, I forgot they even existed till I started writing this article!

Then, what are Meta Descriptions?

The meta-description has some use in search engine optimization, but it won’t actually help improve your ranking. Its usefulness lies in the fact that some searches (Google included) display the description in its search results.

This allows you to create a much targeted piece of text, rather than just letting the search engine grab the chunk of text from your page that just happens to include the search term.

Hmm, can I use page-specific Meta-descriptions?

Of course, in fact it can be a significant positive if you do so. By creating a page-specific meta description for each in your site, you might just encourage a few extra clicks when your page come sup in a search engine listing. Make sure the text adequately describes the page contents, and what the user will find here.

That’s it!

There we go, everything you need to know about keywords and how it relates to SEO is explained. There really isn’t much more to it than that, except maybe how careful you need to be when choosing your keywords. Perhaps some time in the future, I’ll dedicate a post to help you identify key-terms in common niches.

The idea is to pick out common yet not too competitive words, and try to balance the two. Just don’t forget that subtle variations of very competitive words can still wonders for you.