A Bloggers Introduction to SEO
Some people think that SEO is something that can just be ‘done later’ but SEO goes into the way your blog is setup and into everything that you write so it’s a good idea to get an idea about it right at the very beginning so that you don’t have to go back and correct mistakes later on which can be very difficult if not impossible in some cases.
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.
Getting On-Page SEO Correct
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 - you need to make sure you are writing about what you want to target! Don’t overdo it but make sure it appears a handful of times throughout the post.
3) Tags - If your blogging platform allows you to add tags to your posts then ensure that you add one that matches your keyword.
4) The URL - if you are using WordPress then this is very easy to do because it has a feature to allow you to convert your post title into the URL.
What If You Have An Established Blog?
If you already have some earlier posts that you wrote before you learned about SEO there are still some changes you can make retrospectively. One thing that is very important is to ensure that you do not change your URL as this will cause broken links to appear in search engines.
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 latter title is more SEO-friendly as it puts your keywords at the beginning so you can go back and tweak old posts in this way if you like. You can also check through the post itself making sure the keyword appears a few times and if your blogging software supports tags then make sure you tag it with your keyword.
Once you make changes it can take a while for Google to pick it up and act on it so don’t expect results overnight!
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