The Future of SEO For Bloggers
You blog religiously every day. Provide informative and engaging content to your loyal readers. They even have a couple of affiliate links there. But is this enough to get great search engine results for your endeavors? Probably not.
Sure, you will easily appear on the search engine list. But without a top 20 list in a major (Google, Yahoo! or MSN), there is literally no traffic knocking on your door.
To get better results on search engines, you need to make sure that you are using the right keywords (and how to use them), have landmark links, and regularly review the results of your hard work. This is like choosing the Right Keywords. Do you know what keywords your visitors are using to find you?
Most blog sites are a great place to check out how people found you. If you don’t have this feature available, go to http://www.statcounter.com/ and install your free service on your blog right away. Then research those keywords. Go to Overture’s free website (http://inventory.overture.com/) and enter the most general term that users will use to find your blog. You will get a list of related keywords that have been used on a major search engine in the past month.
While this is an over-simplification of the search engine optimization process, you should try to use the most unusual but natural-sounding keywords as your first choice. Placing Keywords in the Right Places.
Once you’ve selected a keyword that applies directly to your blog, you’ll need to include it in the following parts of a full blog post: # The title; # The first sentence; # Any header (if any); # Once a paragraph; and # The last sentence.
If you have links to external sources, use the same keyword as the link text whenever possible. Also, try to choose a different (but related) keyword for each blog post. Feel free to reuse keywords every 30–45 posts. Submission to Directories.
The third step is to publish these keyword-optimized blog posts to article and blog directories. Most search engines determine the relevance of your blog based on the number of external websites that link directly to it. Therefore, posting your blog posts (with a link to your website in the resource blurb) is an easy and hassle-free way to do it.
Checking Your Progress It may take a few days for the results to appear. So wait a week before checking out StatCounter. Have your strokes increased? Are there any new recommendations for search engines? Try Digital Point’s free keyword tracking tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/) to track your blog’s search engine rankings increase for a specific keyword. This is a great way to ensure that your blog positioning efforts are paying off.
With all blog posts, content is key. Without useful and interesting information that cannot be found elsewhere, your visitors will never return. However, when you incorporate these simple search engine optimization (SEO) techniques into your blogging practice, you will retain the visitors you already have and significantly increase your readership through high ranking search engine rankings in no time.
