Basic Search Engine Optimization

Everyone knows that the more visitors a site receives the more successful the site is. Free traffic direct from search results in search engines is preferable to paid traffic. To receive these visitors direct from search results a site must rank well with search engines for it’s chosen keywords.

So how do you optimize your site or blog for search engines?

Here are five tips on how to optimize your blog to improve search engine rankings.

Tip #1: Name Your Pages with Keywords

One of the easiest ways to improve your search engine rankings is to utilize keywords in your domain name and page names. This has high value with search engines and automatically helps your site and pages to rank better. Though it should be noted that the domain should be appropriate to the content on it. Search engines compare your domain name and page names to the content within to decide whether it is appropriate to rank the site for the keywords included in the domain. Wordpress blogs can be set to use post titles as permalinks (a permanent link to a post). When this is done, keywords used in posts title will also appear in the url

Tip #2: Keyword Density

Several years ago there was much talk about keyword density within web communities. Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears per hundred words in your website copy. The general consensus was that a keyword density of around 3% would acheive the desired rankings. This perception led to underhanded techniques like keyword stuffing and adding keywords that didn’t display in content (same color as the background) etc. Ultimately, search engines started penalizing sites that used these sneaky techniques by deindexing them altogether. Now a keyword density of 1% to 2% is sufficient. Keyword density can be safely increased by utilising keywords in graphics filenames and alt text attached to graphics.

Tip #3: Use Less Popular Keywords in the Body of Web Pages

While it is advisable that your domain include a popular keyword for your niche, you should also include less popular keywords in your website copy, especially long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is also known as a keyphrase and generally includes 3-5 words. These keywords have less competition, enabling you to rank well for them while you build your rank for the more popular keywords. Thus, they fulfil the important role of traffic generation while you build your sites reputation. Other related words should also be used. For example: If a site is dedicated to forex trading software then search engines will expect that other related words like; foreign exchange, exchange rates and Wall street will also be included in the site. So to optimize your blog for search engines you should ensure that you include related keywords.

As a site targets more niche related long tail keywords they automatically climb the rankings for that niche. This is the beauty of blogs. Blogs can target unlimited numbers of keywords with posts that target individual keywords. Each post is allocated an individual page which search engines index and the page ranks for the keyword targeted. Especially when permalinks are set to use post titles.

Tip #4: Create lots of quality Links

You need two kinds of links. First: incoming links (otherwise known as backlinks), these are links on external websites that point to your site. Second: internal links that link from one page of your site to another. You should create as many internal and incoming links as possible. With blogs, internal linking is semi automatic via the ‘recent post’ widget in the sidebar or the archives.

The more backlinks and internal links you have, the more important the search engines will view your site as and the higher your site will climb in the search results. Backlinks are the single most important aspect of search engine ranking. Links on related websites are far superior to those on unrelated websites however. This means if you have a site about internet marketing, you won’t want backlinks on a site about training cats as this link would provide very little ‘link love’ to your site. A link on another internet marketing site will be viewed as much more relevant, and therefore more important. So to effectively optimize your blog make sure to restrict backlinks to related sites.

Tip #5: Don’t pay for thousands of links to be created.

The final way to improve search engine rankings is not to pay services to create thousands of links to your site. While this may sound strange considering the last tip, you need to consider how these services achieve these links. In most cases they use what are known as link farms. Link farms are sites containing thousands of links to external sites. The search engines view these as ‘bad neighbourhoods’ and sites listed risk being deindexed by the search engines altogether. This means that ALL references to your site will be removed from the search engines index. This doesn’t mean that you can’t pay for backlinks at all. Just be sure that the service used will use ethical, natural looking linking procedures like those used by Resources4Marketers

Using these tips to optimize your blog will give your site a higher ranking in search engines. This will result in increased traffic and lead to more money for you.

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