Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
Many search engine marketers often complain that blogs are taking out all the quality search results. This makes an important conclusion that one can hardly conduct a search without getting blog content in its results. There are many good bloggers who have excellent content or article writing ability and who deserves to be read, seldom get noticed because their blog-spot occurs way below in result pages. Another important fact is, there are more than 1 million blogs and it is very difficult to find a place there. These days’ people ruin their entire blog-spots only to get so called “OPTIMIZED”. Optimization means “the act of rendering optimal solution”. Bloggers these days implement number of quick facts, get recommendations, add links, do optimization but forget the sole purpose of a blog. When I joined the training program SEO book by Aaron Wall, the first thing that came to my mind was “I have been lied to by the so called SEO experts”. SEO is a constanly changing field and you need to be adapted more.
Some of the simple ways, which can be used by bloggers or WordPress users to get their pages optimized, are listed below-
- Keep the blog simple and provide good quality content on concerned topics.
- Provide contents that are Keyword Rich. Use contents that get good indexing by Google. The main motto of the blog should be highlighted well. For example, if it is a blog about Satyam Scam, provide rich contents with high quality keywords like ‘Satyam’ , ‘Finance’ and ‘scam’.
A rich content blog is the best food for web spiders. By providing keyword-rich content, it means to create a blog content that a search engine can very easily index and display when keywords are part of selection in search engine. Bloggers can very easily boost up their blog-spots by doing keyword research before they actually develop a blog and then the next step is analyzing the results of their research which can help them in content creation.
Some say keyword research is an art like forensic science. Many SEO professionals also recommend development of some additional content to fill keyword gaps. Blogging turns the typical keyword research process in all these aspects. Since, blogs are constantly updated with new and fresh content by bloggers; there remains an endless spectrum of opportunities for creating keyword-rich content.
Effective keyword research is required keeping in mind the target audience. Before starting the blog content, one should think about – Who is the target audience of this blog? What are his expectations from this blog? What are the hot-button keywords for audience? Since most of the blogs are effectively on a single topic, they intrinsically have tightly controlled vocabularies.
As one decides the audience, he/she is by default, doing a preliminary keyword research. This researched keyword list developed during the audience-definition phase can act as a base to become a working modular guide for content development. Since these keywords reflect the actual topic and interest of the audience, they do not have to be forced or stuffed as page content. We mean effective blog writing is an essence of development of timely, accurate and topical content guided by some pre-selected and controlled vocabulary. The content should never loose the main motto of its existence while optimizing and should propagate its idea without losing the free and natural voice of the blog.
Second most important thing is optimizing its audience identification. The blog should appear in result pages whenever a relevant keyword is searched in the Search engines.
Do Keywords really matter with Blog Usability?
Categorize the contents of your blog. Check if the blog technology or blog software in use locks the user into its own structure. Give permissions to users to define categories of their own for your contents. There should be ample scope to categorize the blog content. A well-categorized page remains in easy reach of web-crawler.
The ability to create categories and subcategories create wonders for improving the search engine sensitivity and the usability of the blog. These can reflect the interest of key audience and the content itself. Such text links are known as “keyword opportunity zones.”
When a blogger writes something, he is actually sharing his content with his audience. Using keywords in the content will ensure that web-crawlers and search engines find the blog easily. Remember using rich keywords in category architecture of a blog extends the real value of a blog and improves its effectiveness and usability/reusability. After all, this is what a blog is all about – isn’t it?
- Created a themed blog space. Make your blog specialized on a particular theme. Let it be related to philosophy, finance or love. Make website with 100s of pages on the same theme so that web-spiders & crawlers find it easy to reach.
- Create good site design. The page should be indexed properly to help web-crawler navigate through pages easily. Try to provide as much RELEVANT content as possible and make sure that all pages are easily viewable from web browser.
- Keep blog design clear and simple
- Increase the article content space.
- Have a clear blog title
- Attract peoples/visitors by your blog-content. It should steal attention within few seconds of visit.
- When a visitor tries to find an article on your blog, the text of the blog should be visible instantly.
- Create RSS. Try to create your own RSS for the blog space. Submit RSS to My Yahoo, Google or other leading search engines.
- Optimizing Pay Per click advertisement. To optimize your campaign effectively you need to use reputable Search Engine. One can come across several search engines that offer low-cost advertising but one can rarely think of rewards from these type of advertisements as they have relatively low volumes. SEO-ing also means finding good search engine like Google, Yahoo, and MSN to advertise with. High click ads should also take care of conversion rate. This can be done by filtering out browsers and identifying the need to pre-qualify clicks to attract buyers. Example: Add price of the product. This may decrease rates or number of clicks but will eventually make your blog-spot well optimized. Make sure the relative path mentioned in the URL of the ad should take the browser to designated place. This will avoid loss of interest. A key to success of PPC is to optimize each ad within individual ad group. In PPC advertisement, the primary aim of the optimizer is to create an ad, which is high performing and has high click rate. Once a SEOed PPC ad is created, you need to do small variation & further optimization to make it perform even better.
- Create unique and accurate page titles. As a title tells the user what the article is all about, similarly it also helps search engines to understand and index the page properly. The
- Take care of rel=”no follow” for all link. Set the “rel” attribute of the page link to “no follow”. This will help Google to understand that certain links on your blogs should not pass your page’s reputation to the entire website the page links to. This is very important for blogs where public comments are allowed and everyone can read them. Links within those blog comments or spam mails within chains can easily pass your reputation to pages that you would like to link.
Another use of “no follow” is when you are writing a new content and you do not want to pass your reputation to that page.
- Make use of several free Google Webmaster tool. These tools help you understand what Google looks for when it interacts with a website. It can also help you analyze your website in a professional way.
- Be wise when you are selecting your Blog name/WordPress Theme name. If it is a quality blog-spot with many inbound links, you can reap results by just having a good domain name. Understand your motto properly and choose the name of your blog-site wisely.
- Provide just a topic for every post. This should be understood that more focused you are on the theme of a page the better when Search Engines come to rank it. Sometimes we start with a particular theme for a blog but end up providing much irrelevant information’s. Avoid this. They may give a loose & poor relation for search engine ranking.
- Create Email Subscription on blogs. It may feel strange but emails are still most preferred way for people to receive alerts, information and new updates.
Free service such as feedburner can be used which manage subscriptions very easily. However, if a blog site owner wants more control on his web-links, he can use auto responder mails or customized auto responder system to follow-up with blog subscribers. This will also help in communicating new postings immediately to subscribers.
- Use pings. There are various services like Pingomatic which update various search engines whenever there is a update in your blog.
- Lastly, use WordPress as a blog tool and a platform for publishing. For people who are not novice but not that capable of optimizing can use WordPress as a blog tool. WordPress comes with many inbuilt SEO tools like creating static URLs, pinging and blogrolling. Now a day, there are many third-party plug-in available which can be used as a plug-in for search engine optimization (SEO).