SEO Strategy for Blogs

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Disclosure: I’m a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) klutz. I don’t focus on SEO a lot. Neither do I keep up with the current SEO tricks and tactics. But I was going through my website statistics for last week and found that a whole 4.28% of traffic now comes from search engines! So thought, may be you will find what I do for SEO… mildly helpful.

Pie-Graph showing Traffic Sources for BlogClout.com/blog. Image from Google Analytics.

4 SEO Steps I Focus on:

1. Having Good Title Pages
Many blogs have their page Titles in the following format:

[Blog Name] - [Blog Post Title]

Which doesn’t make good sense. For the search engines as well for website visitors. When people bookmark your page, your post title will often be cut off. And people won’t know what they’ve bookmarked after a couple of weeks. Make it easier on people. Always use the following format for all your blog post Title Pages.

[Blog Post Title] - [Blog Name]

I also make sure that the Title of the blog posts have relevant keywords: words that people might search for.

2. Making Sure All the Blog Posts & Pages are Crawled by Search Engines
How will the search engines send you traffic if they haven’t even indexed your blog properly? It is essential to make sure all your blog posts and content is crawled by the search engine bots. So how do you do that?

You create a “sitemap” for your blog - a xml page that has links to all the blog posts and pages on your domain name.

• WordPress users can use this plugin to automate the creation of these sitemaps: Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress
   
• For blogs on other platforms, you could try using this Online XML Sitemap Generato. (Note: I haven’t used this online tool. So am not sure how good it is.)

Another minor thing I do is tend to link to old blog posts from new ones. I’m not sure if this helps search engine rankings (probably letting search engines know that the old posts are still relevant today). But it surely helps in increasing my page views.

3. Focusing on Creating Good “Linkable” Content
The more blogs and websites that link to you, the higher your search engine rankings will be. So focusing on creating excellent content that others would be happy to link to is the key to search engine success.

Before starting to post regularly on this blog, I made a goal.

Create atleast one “super blog post” every 2 weeks.

Note: content does not only mean articles. One of the most linked blog post on my blog is the Buy Me a Beer plugin post.

Here are a few other ideas for creating excellent linkable content.

4. Focusing on the Long Tail of Keywords
Out of the 139 visitors from search engines this blog received last week, the first most popular search term is searched 13 times. But the second most popular search term is searched only 3 times.

Most people found this blog through search engines using keywords and phrases that no one else used.

So how to find the long tail of keywords and phrases?

i. Find out what blog posts are most popular on your blog (Use a web analyzing tool. I rely on Google Analytics.)

ii. Pick up key phrases from that post. Take help from the keyword list that your web analyzing tool provides you with - the terms people have used till now to find your blog.

iii. Write more blog posts on those key phrases.

iv. Use a tool like Good Keywords to find related keywords to your top phrases. And write blog posts using those phrases too.

Alternatively, you can sign up for a service like HitTail and add a code to your blog. And let them find a list of relevant long tail keywords for you automatically.

SEO Things I *don’t* focus on:

• Meta data.
• Asking people to link using specific key words.
• Giving a hoot to page ranks and SEO mumbo-jumbo.
• Creating link farms, asking for reciprocal link exchanges, or paying for links on high page rank websites.

Further Reading:

As I said, I’m a SEO klutz. If you really want to focus on SEO, then you may find these links helpful:

• Google’s Guide to increasing your search engine ranking
   
• SEO Book Blog by Aaron Wall (Aaron has also written a superb book on SEO. You may want to buy that if you are really serious about increasing your blog traffic through search engines.)

Action Summary:
(My SEO Strategy in 2 sentences:)

1. Create good valuable “linkable” content
2. Make it easy for the search engines to find the content

Do you have any easy SEO trick to share? Please add your tip to the comments.

If you liked this post, buy me a beer. (Suggested: $3 a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)

Spread the word:
del.icio.us Digg Reddit StumbleUpon

Posted by Ankesh Kothari under Traffic on 09 Jun 2007

If You Liked This Post, You May Also Like...

• Copyright Permission Strategy
• Increase Your Search Engine Traffic by 15-20% in 3 Minutes
• Link Clout # 4

---