SEO is search engine optimization. This is how your blog and content is discovered by someone searching for a specific topic. Topics are keywords. If more of your content is discovered by people searching search engines, you benefit by more unique visitors, pageviews, and hopefully more subscribers.
Bloggers want people to read their content. We use several avenues to get our content noticed. We broadcast our posts using including social media, email subscriptions and communities.
There are several ways to increase your search engine optimazation when creating your blog, writing a post, and tracking the traffic.
Creating a SEO Friendly Blog
When creating a blog choose a title and URL that is search engine friendly and use keywords. Pick a topic and use it in your URL. Remember, a URL should not be more than 20 letters in length. This way the URL is easy to remember and type.
By using keywords in your URL and blog title, the search engines can relate searches to your blog.
If you are using WordPress there are many SEO plugins that give multiple options to help your search engine friendliness. Some themes like the one I use, Genesis by Studiopress, have great search engine options built into them. Make sure you visit all the options and set them up. Just having the plugin or theme with SEO options built in is not enough if you do not set them up. Choosing a theme that is not complicated and that does not have “dirty CSS” coding is key also. You want the web crawlers to be able to read your content easily.
Creating A SEO Friendly Post
Each post you write on your blog is another chance for more traffic to your site. Create on topic posts using the topic as the keywords in the post, slug, tags, and categories. you can search for related keywords with Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Make sure you have keywords in the first sentence and last sentence. You can also use bold and italics to emphasize keywords. This helps the web crawlers understand the topic of the post. Link to content that is related to your blog post that is outside of your site. This will build relevance to your post.
If you have SEO options, fill them in with your keywords and create a description that is attention grabbing that includes your keywords. People searching for the topic will see the description. You want them to choose your site over the other search engine results.
Tracking SEO Results
You need to know if your SEO efforts have paid off. There are several ways to do this. Doing a simple search for your keywords is one way to see if you come up where you want to in search engine results. You can also use tools like Google Webmasters tool, your analytics program, and plugins to track your visibility. You should be looking how many times a certain keyword or keyword phrase was searched and a visitor arrived to your site, how much traffic is from search engines, and the most popular topics searched.
SEO is a very large topic and there are many steps involved in getting it right. You might not get it all at first but continuing to learn about it and finding with works for you is key. Search engine optimization is key to gaining more exposure and traffic for your blog.
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About Jessica Benton
I would agree, the reasons for ranking are more important to me as well. They sound nice but don’t necessarily convert traffic. This is a solid post for beginners to SEO like myself. Thanks!