Blogging Basics: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Note: What I outline below are the absolute basics for SEO. If you really want to know how to drive traffic to your site using the search engines then I highly recommend the Seo Book. It will teach you everything you could ever need to know about SEO. The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms but the SEO book sends you free updates on the latest techniques at no additional cost.

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Understanding and implementing the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for all bloggers looking to gain traffic. This information can be found at numerous sources but I have written this post especially for the readers of Blogging Fingers.

1. On-Site Optimisation

Keywords

This involves making your blog ’search engine friendly’. Keywords and keyword phrases play a very important part in this. A keyword phrase for your site is what someone types into a search engine (usually Google) to find your site. I.e. It is a phrase that you rank highly in the SERPS for (search engine results pages) and have content that is highly relevant to that phrase.

How do I chose Keywords?

Ultimately choosing a keyword phrase is about finding a keyword that has high numbers of people searching for it (per month) and little competition in Google, and is relevant to the content on your site.

There are lots of different tools available for this, I use the free SEO book keyword suggestion tool combined with a Google search. The trick is to start broad and work down until you have a suitable keyword phrase.

Example:

Imagine I were trying to find keywords for my Web hosting site. I would type in to the SEO Book tool “web hosting”.

“web hosting” is a highly searched for keyword (over 3million per month). A Google search for “web hosting” reveals there are already over 261 million competitors indexed for that phrase, which means it is not attainable.

If you are searching for the primary keyword, which will be in the URL and the Title of the page, having a few million competitors is acceptable, but if the phrase is only partially in the URL/Title and will be largely down to the content then 1 - 2 million competitors is pushing it.

*note this is from my experience only and may differ with other phrases, also the Seo Book tools is an imperfect estimation so don’t base a whole business plan on what it says, but it’s perfectly suitable for blogging.

Looking down the SEO Book tools results, there is no point in Googleing the other top terms because they will almost definitely have far to many competitors.

Further down the results, is “inexpensive web hosting”, which receives approximately 9,000 searches per month. Googleing that phrase reveals 1.3 million competitors. Bingo, that is a good keyword phrase for Web Hosting. Web hosting is a somewhat saturated niche and so it is very difficult to find a fantastic keyword phrase to go for, but this is not the case in all niches.

Below: Google reveals 1.3 million results for “inexpensive web hosting”

How to Rank Highly for a Keyword

Once you have found a suitable collection of keyword phrases it’s time to optimise the site for them. This involves the use of that keyword in every different part of the site. The two most important parts which are given the most weight in Google is the URL, which hopefully matches or partially matches a keyword phrase and the Title of the page (both of which are “Blogging Fingers” for this site.

If your homepage URL does not match a phrase it is not the end of the world. This is especially true because with WordPress, you can custom set the permalinks. This sounds scary but it really is very simply and is very important for SEO.

Customising Permalinks
In the WordPress Dashboard, you go to options-permalinks and select “custom”. Then enter this:

/%category%/%postname%/

To save the changes select “update permalink structure”.

What that does is change the makeup of the URL for each individual post so that it’s category and postname are included. Hopefully the category includes the keyword phrase and the postname (title of the post) does too. If you already have blog posts published you can use this permalink migration plugin which creates 301 redirects so you don’t end up with a whole load of broken links.

Content
Other than having the keyword phrase in the URL and title tags the keywords should be used in the content. They are given more weight by Google at the beginning and ends of a post or if they are in bold or using an heading tag. One of the lessons I have learnt from blogging is that it is always best to write for the readers and only for the search engines if it fits. Find out why below…

Internal Linking Structure
The Anchor text (see below) of links to your own posts is also important and should be descriptive, ideally containing some keywords.

2. Off-site Optimisation

The other important factor in SEO is attaining inbound links. This is why it is so important to write for the reader, because they may have a blog of their own and so if they like what they read may link to you. If they see your content is badly written with keyword phrases awkwardly shoved in you are unlikely to get any link-lovin’.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the part of the text in a hyperlink that is visible to both humans and web-crawling bots. This is important for all links, those that are inbound to your site, the internal linking structure as well as outbound links, which should be relevant to the topic of your site. Google has been cracking down on attempts to ‘game the system’ or by sponsored links with a certain anchor text and so it is important to vary the anchor text slightly, so that it still contains the keywords but perhaps in a different order.

Penalisation

This should not be something to be worried about. All of the above points should be done in moderation i.e. no keyword stuffing in any part of on-site optimisation. The most important thing is to not fully rely on traffic from the search engines because you never know when they will change their algorithm. This backs up the fact that with blogging is is best to write for the reader, and not for Google because eventually the ranking algorithm will be so good, attempts to game the system will fail more frequently.

Extras

I use the all in one SEO Plugin, which allows each post to be optimised for the search engines.

This Seo Book will teach you the rest of the ever evolving subject of search engine optimisation.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Keywords, keyword phrase, SEO Book tools

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