Ten Simple SEO Tips

Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by babsalletle in SEO

If you are a Blog­ger then there is every chance that you are famil­iar with the term Search Engine Opti­miza­tion or SEO. From the term itself, you can under­stand that it can be help­ful for you to get good posi­tion in search engine results and as a result it will bring more traf­fic for you and you can earn more money. So, many peo­ple are inter­ested about this field and some­times many spam­mers want to take advan­tage by apply­ing the rules. Of course the spam­mers do not apply the rules but abuse them.

The Goals

Before giv­ing you the tips let us try to fig­ure out what are the goals for you when you want to opti­mize your web­site for the search engine. The first thing you want per­haps is to have good Google page rank. For exam­ple, this blog is new and is yet to get any page rank but I am hop­ping that in the next page rank update, it will get page rank of 3 or 4 accord­ing to Google. I have a blog called South Asia Blog with page rank six and I got this rank within six months.

Link pop­u­lar­ity is another fac­tor that you want good suc­cess. We all want our blog or web­site to get a lot of back links from Google. The more back links your blog has the stronger it becomes.

SERP is called as Search Engine Result Page. You see that peo­ple are search­ing all the time and when you search some­thing on a par­tic­u­lar thing related to your blog then your dream is always that you are in the first three posi­tions of search engine result.

Search engine traf­fic is another thing that we all want because the more search engine traf­fic we can get our income can increase. It is a gen­eral maxim that search engine traf­fic will bring more rev­enue for you from adver­tise­ment pro­gra­mas like Adsence or Chi­tika com­pared to non-search engine traffic.

Ok, we now know the goals. Now, I am going to give some very sim­ple tips about search engine opti­miza­tion. Of course, I do not want to claim that I am an expert in this field. The tips are mainly for infor­ma­tional and read­ing pur­pose. Before apply­ing them you should be very care­ful because if you apply them in the wrong way then it can harm your blog instead of bring­ing any good result.

1. Title: Title is a very impor­tant fac­tor because when you search some­thing in Google then the first thing that you notice is title of any search result. For exam­ple, sup­pose you are search­ing about “South Asia” and in the title of a web­site you find the phrase “South Asia” then it is more likely that you will visit that web page. The same way, search engines give a lot of impor­tance to the title while dis­play­ing your search results. One basic rule is to put your key word in the title. How­ever, do not try to fool Google. For exam­ple, if in your title you write about ‘live score’ of a cricket or foot­ball match and then in your arti­cle you don’t give live score or link to a web­page that is giv­ing live score then you are try­ing to fool Google. Just remem­ber that Google will catch you sooner or later and you will be in trouble.

2. Design: Design of your blog is impor­tant because if the design is beau­ti­ful and easy to browse and nav­i­gate then it is obvi­ous that peo­ple will browse more pages. If they like your con­tent then they will hap­pily give more like to you.

3. Social Book­mark­ing: I want to give impor­tance of this fac­tor because when you write some­thing then in the ini­tial days, it is very dif­fi­cult to get search engine traf­fic. Pro­mot­ing becomes very dif­fi­cult but if you can make good use of social book­mark­ing sites like Digg, Redit, fark etc then you can find new vis­i­tors very eas­ily. Not only that when an entry hits the main page of Digg or Redit then many other web­sites or blogs give link to it. It helps a lot in mak­ing your blog strong to the search engines. How­ever, don’t overdo it because you may get banned.

4. Net­work­ing in your Niche: When you are writ­ing about a par­tic­u­lar topic then it is very impor­tant that you know what oth­ers are doing in that field. Never think that your com­peti­tors are your enemy. Just think that they are your com­pan­ions and they are work­ing in the same field. Try to make good rela­tion­ship with them and it will help you a lot. When you write a good entry then if pos­si­ble email the link to them so that they can take a look. On the other hand, if you find a good entry in your com­peti­tors blog never hes­i­tate to inform your read­ers about it.

5. Orig­i­nal con­tent: it is some­thing that every Blog­ger must do. You should not copy paste and you should not write poor con­tent. Always try to write qual­ity and orig­i­nal con­tent. Orig­i­nal con­tent is liked by every­one includ­ing the search engines. When you copy paste from other web­sites or blogs then nat­u­rally peo­ple will dis­cover it sooner or later and will dis­like you. Never be self­ish in giv­ing link to qual­ity content.

6. Fol­low Google web­mas­ter guide­lines: One of the best things that Google has done is to cre­ate a Google web­mas­ter guide­lines. You should also sub­mit your sitemap and web­site by cre­at­ing a Google web­mas­ter tools account. You should read the Google web­mas­ter con­tent guide­line and design guide line very care­fully and try to fol­low them as much as possible.

7. Link wisely and avoid bad neigh­bor­hood: I wish that every Blog­ger fol­low this les­son. I can tell you the story of a Blog­ger whom I know. He gave link to a junk blog and got severely pun­ished by Google. His traf­fic has dropped sharply and does not increase no mat­ter what he tries. He did not do any­thing bad but as I told you he gave link to a blog that is full of junk con­tent and has vio­lated all kind of copy­right law. Within one month his Google back­links dropped sig­nif­i­cantly and any per­son who knows about SEO will eas­ily under­stand that his blog has been pun­ished by Google. As a result, it will be very dif­fi­cult for him to get new links from estab­lished blog­gers because if they link to him then they may also suf­fer from bad neigh­bor­hood problem.

From Google Web­mas­ter Guidelines:

Don’t par­tic­i­pate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s rank­ing or PageR­ank. In par­tic­u­lar, avoid links to web spam­mers or “bad neigh­bor­hoods” on the web, as your own rank­ing may be affected adversely by those links.

8. Read: The best way to learn about search engine opti­miza­tion is actu­ally to read about it. There is a lot of infor­ma­tion about it in Inter­net and almost every­thing is free.

9. Don’t depend on oth­ers for SEO: To be hon­est with you, I get a lot of emails every day from so called SEO experts who say to me that they can improve my rank­ing. The funny thing is that when I check their web­sites most of the time I see that their page rank or Google back links are much lower than most of my blogs. So, I say to myself that if really they are expert then how come they don’t have any web­site or blog with page rank 6 or 7.

10. Don’t try to Fool Google: Yes, please never try to find a short­cut in SEO. Google has become so suc­cess­ful because when we search some­thing it brings out the most rel­e­vant web­pages related to the topic that we are look­ing for.

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