Getting Started With SEO for Bloggers
Many people don’t think about SEO in the beginning and believe that it is something that can be saved for a leter time. However this isn’t true because when done properly, SEO would be incorporated into your blog setup and it is much better to think of it from the outset rather than trying to correct mistakes later.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Search engines are an excellent source of completely free traffic that continues to pour in for years to come but it usually takes a long time for a brand new site to begin getting traction in the search engines which is another reason why it makes sense to consider it from day 1.
SEO is all about ranking content in the search engines so of course you need content and this is why blogs can do so well with SEO because they are full of content! However SEO is about keywords and its quite easy to write a blog post that doesn’t rank for any useful keywords and the traffic potential is never reached.
Optimising Your Posts For On-Page SEO
The first step in optimising your posts is knowing what keyword phrase you want to target. It is possible to target more than one but much more difficult. Now one thing that I would emphasise here is that as a blogger, particularly if you are starting out, if you have no idea about what keywords you want to target then just don’t worry about it as its best to concentrate on writing good content than thinking about search engines.
However if your blog is more specialised then it might be obvious what keywords to pick. For example if you had some kind of photography blog and you were reviewing a particular camera then it would make sense to optimise the post for the brand and model of the camera as that it what people would search for. There are several places in the post when you need to place your keyword:
1) The title - at the very beginning if possible. This is the single most important element.
2) The post content - your keyword should sppear a few times throughout the body of your post but don’t go over the top with it.
3) Tags - Most blogging software such as WordPress allow you to add tags to your posts. Make sure your keyword is one of them.
4) The URL - it is preferable for your keywords to be embedded in the actual URL rather than having something like www.myblog.com/?p=123
What If You Have An Established Blog?
Even if you have already started your blog and written several posts without SEO in mind there are still some tweaks you can make. One thing you must NOT do is change your URL though as otherwise your blog will start reporting broken links.
One thing that you can change quite safely is the text within your post though. You can tweak titles, body copy and add tags to make it more keyword friendly. For example one tweak you might want to make it putting your keywords earlier in the title. For example if you wanted to rank for “make money blogging”, which of these two titles is best? :
- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today! - Make Money Blogging - 10 Killer Ideas!
The second one is better as far as SEO goes because the target phrase comes first in the title. Have a read through your article and make sure your keyword is liberally sprinkled throughout the copy text and don’t forget to add a tag if possible.
It can take a while for Google to pick up changes in a post though so you won’t necessarily see changes in your traffic straight away.
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