Thursday, August 20, 2015

Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bloggers - SEO

While blogging implement best practices in whitehat SEO for blogs. Here are ethical SEO tips to rank your blog higher on Google.

Optimizing the domain name for your blog

It’s very important for bloggers to operate with an own domain name and use a good blogging platform and paid hosting. Or buy a domain name and map them to your existing blog on blogspot, wordpress or other blogging platforms. Having your own name tells search engines your intention and commitment to give users good content. The period for which you book a domain name also speaks about your long term blogging plans. If it’s booked for a short period, it could also reveal that you may be a fly by night operator looking to make a quick buck.

Tips for Domain names

Domain names must reveal the core of your blog’s theme – example: caps.com (if you were selling caps), starsigns.com (if you were blogging on star signs), or yoga4weightloss.com (if you were running a blog on this theme).
No long domain names
No domain names that don’t instantly connect to the audience. For example, Impact.com and you are talking about fishing.
Preferred domain extensions are .com, .net, .biz, .info, edu and country extensions.

SEO friendly niche content for Blogs

Search engines rank sites higher if they have focused content on a particular subject. Choose a theme for your blog, preferably in niche areas, not in broad domains. For example, if you look at “Gifts”, it will be difficult to get a lot of traffic and rank higher on search engines like Google, since competition will be very high from establishes sites that have a lot of content and money to promote the site.

Instead look at Gifts for New Borns or Gifts for ex-boyfriends, gifts for schoolmates, gifts for older people. Here you need to build your authority on the subject by writing a series of articles on different themes – gifts for various occasions, worst gifts to give, personalizing gifts, special gifts, gadget gifts, wrapping gifts, gift notes, re-gifting, when to send gifts, best gifts, etc.

About 200 to 300 pages of top quality original and fresh content will do wonders for your weblog.

Keywords relevancy to blog post’s topic

When you write a post on any subject, always think of how the user would search for such content. What words would they type into Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search engines. Your title should reflect the core subject with words that users will type to search for the content. Like my title for this post - Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bloggers and Blogs – SEO. Google for your content and see the top results in different search engines to get a fair understanding of what keywords to use in your title.

And your text should have a variation of the relevant keywords. This is to guide the search engine bot to understand the content. So if it’s on gifting to girlfriends, you may use a sprinkling of the words – gifts, gifting, presents, love, romantic, gift ideas, girls, women, wrapping, cute, gifts for her, cool gifts etc.

SEO tips for keyword rich content

Your title should have the important keywords for the blog post
The heading should reflect them
The tags of your post must contain the keywords
The alt tags – the title of you pictures on that blog page
The anchor text – keyword phrases text that link out to the complete post or to some other article outside your site

All the above should not be repetitive, but be variations of the important keywords

SEO Tip: The keywords written must be natural and meaningful. It’s should be overloaded for search engine rankings. Use just enough for users to find the content engrossing.

Blog navigation

The design of your blog should be simple. And the navigation ie., the links on your site should be placed in vantage points to allow user to easily find information on your site. All posts should be categorized well. This is a key SEO advice that you must follow. This allows users looking for a particular topic to quickly head to the relevant content and continue reading your blog posts.

Do not place ads, images or widgets in odd places and interfere with the user experience. Let users quickly go and read what they are interested in.

Tags and categories

Most blogging softwares today have the facility of tagging and categorization. Use the most relevant keywords to tag your post and categorise each blog article well. Do not use too many tags, nor too many general keywords in the tags. Use caetgory names that users generally search for. And limit the number of categories to manageable levels.

Connect to users with interactive tools

I’m sure some of you are familiar with feeds. Kindly give the feed links on your blog. It helps users who have liked your content to keep in touch with your blog. Don’t forget to have a search bar while blogging. This makes for more page views since readers are looking for some content at that point in time, and if you have it served via search, you are only getting them to spend more time reading on your blog. Allow comments to come from usres – they tell you what’s right or wrong with the blog content. Comments are used by search engines like Google to understand whether people liked your blog or not. And they also build your brand.

Using an analytics tool to build traffic

Bloggers must use an analytics tool, like Google Analytics, which is free anyway, to understand user behaviour on site. How search engines like Google are treating your blog’s content is revealed in your blog. What keywords do people use to come upon your blog. Using this you can build more content on such keyword phrases, which are relevant to your webblog.

They also tell you the top content on your blog. Find out why Google is ranking them well and do more of the same. Where do users come from, keywords they used to land on your blog, which are your top landing pages, which page did they go to next – all this and more is revealed by an analytics tool. They help you in mapping user behaviour. And help in building traffic to your blog. Sign up right away for Google Analytics.

These simple search engine optimization tips should help you begin blogging and building a base of loyal users.

(Moving all my content from my old blog SEO4Google.org)

1 comment:

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