It is an indisputable fact that the most effective way to draw in new visitors to your blogs is through achieving good SERPs. But what in the world is are SERPs? An acronym for Search Engine Result Pages, and a term commonly used when talking about how well a site is doing in search engines and similar. Unfortunately for us bloggers, the sad truth is that gaining decent SERPs is hard work, and it can even take years before a blog or a website achieves decent ranks for the relevant keywords in the popular search engines. This article will introduce you to the world of Search Engine Optimization, and provide you with a few pointers on what it takes to get decent ranks, and what measures you should take from the moment you start your blog in order to maximize your chances of success with the search engines.
What is SEO?
If you've looked at blogs or websites that pertain the fields of web development, you have most likely come across the term "SEO". It is an abbreviation for "Search Engine Optimization" as the title of the article states, and in short SEO is the art of optimizing your SERPs in order to improve the volume and quality of the visitors that find your blog through search engines.
The advantages of search engine traffic are many and highly substantial. It is obviously free, but as you'll learn it still comes at a price. The visitors you get through search engines are most likely extremely relevant to the topic of your blog, seeing how they found it through searching for something similar, and are likely to be return visitors if they see something they like. Search engine traffic is so highly valued by many that SEO has become a lucrative business for those who have mastered it, as many website owners often look to hire people who can help them improve their rankings in the search engines. Now I can't promise you that after reading this article here, you'll be ready and fit to start your own SEO Consultant Business, but you will at least get the basics and be able to seperate good practices from bad.
Time to get started
The first thing you need to do if you want to get ranked in the search engines is to make them aware of your blog. If they don't even know that it exists, it isn't very likely that they'll rank it very well! Of course, by getting links from other blogs that are already being indexed by the search engines, they will eventually pick up your blog as well, but why would we want to sit on our bums and wait?
When submitting blogs to the search engines, I personally prefer doing it by hand. That means going to each and every one of them and using their submission forms. Of course there are services that automate this process for you that you can utilize, and some of these include
Addweb,
Web Position Gold and
Web CEO. Like I said, I prefer the old-fashion way because I have found it to be the most effective, but if you're too lazy you can use one of these programs.
After you submit your blogs you will need patience, and lots of it. It can take up to months to get indexed by the most influential search engines like
Google and
Yahoo. If you're lucky however, they will start indexing your blog almost immediately. Remember though, submitting your site several times won't speed up the process, but only extend the que of sites awaiting approval. Unlike some people claim though, submitting several times will
not get you banned. If this was the case, a lot of people would be spending a lot of time submitting their competitors' sites to the search engines.
Okay, I submitted, what next?
Great, now we're ready to start thinking about what you can do to improve your SERPs once your blog is indexed by the search engines. The very first things you should consider is your URL structure. You will want to set up an URL structure that consists of words relevant to the articles (typicall the title), and not a bunch of random numbers. It takes about two minutes to do this with WordPress, and it is something you should do before you open up your blog, because it can be a hassle to change at a later point.
Nobody knows exactly what URL stucture is the most optimal, but typically it should like I said describe the content of the page. Some prefer to a setup like this:
While others prefer to include the category as well, like this:
I myself do the latter, but I have no evidence that it works better than the first example. I simply do out because I feel it looks better to include the category of the article as well, though it might be redundant.
The next step you want to do is take a look at your META tags that reside in the <HEAD> part of your coding. Contrary to popular belief however, these won't help you rank better, because the search engines don't incorporate the tags into their ranking algorithms. They are still useful, because many search engines use the META descriptions in the descriptions of your blog, and a good description can decide whether or not a person decides to click your link. Don't spend too much time on this however, just write a short and precise description of your blog, and throw in some keywords.
This is what the META tags should look like, and they should like I mentioned be in the HEAD section of your HTML codes, between <HEAD> and </HEAD>:
Quote:
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<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2" />
<meta name="description" content="description" />
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Once you have your URL structure and your META tags ready to go, we can advance to the next stage of this lecture.
Write Quality Content - Content IS King
I can not put enough emphasis on how important this is, but I will try to illustrate with an example. A couple of years ago I ran a website called
Zelda Universe, and without any knowledge about SEO whatsoever I was able to make it the number result for the term "
Zelda", even ahead of Nintendo's own official Zelda site in as good as every major search engine. I am completely convinced that this was due to the fact that we had quality content that surpassed all other relevant sites, that both people and search engines rated highly. You'll be surprised at how sophisticated the search engine spiders have become, and they aren't kidding when they say that you should write your content for people, because search engines will reward it.
A good practice is also to keep your headlines short and descriptive. Typically they will be wrapped around <hX> tags in your style (at least they should be), and look like for instance this:
Quote:
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<h1>Title of the Article</h1>
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Search engines use what's inside the <hX> tags to figure out what your content is about, and what keywords they should display specific articles for. This means that you more often than not should use short and descriptive headlines, rather than clever ones that don't say much about what you're writing about. It's also important to keep it short, because the more keywords in your article title, the less value search engines will give to each one.
Links are Queen
When we classify content as king, there is no denying that links are queen. You can never get enough links. I am of course talking about links from other blogs and websites. While many aspects of SEO are still up for debate, nobody will try to refute the important of incoming links. This number of incoming links to your blog is completely crucial when search engines rank your blog, and
Technorati, the leading search engine for blogs, even ranks all blogs and how popular they are based on incoming links.
You should be aware of that even though you comment on other blogs and include a link back to your blog, these links will not necessarily be counted in the rankings. This is because of the
nofollow tag that Google introduced a while back, and many website and blog platforms like for instance WordPress automatically include the
nofollow tag on all links in user generated sections, like comments on blogs. What the nofollow tag does, is tell the search engine spiders that they shouldn't follow this link, and therefore it won't.
So when looking to increase your amount of incoming links, try to get other bloggers to write about your content and link to it, and get on as many blogrolls as you can. This will do wonders for your rankings! An important aspect of collecting links from other blogs and sites are the anchor text. Anchor text are the words that are hyperlinked. An example:
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<a href="http://bloggst.com/">Community for Bloggers</a>
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In this example, the anchor text for the link to Bloggst is "Community for Bloggers". This will tell the search engines what the link is about, and it will help increase our ratings for the phrase "Community for Bloggers", as well as other similar phrases. Therefore when collecting links, you should always try to get those who link back to you to use clear and descriptive anchor text, as this will significantly help you in receiving relevant and targeted traffic from the search engines.
It is also good to interlink everything on your blog, like when referring to an old article you wrote, you should link to it with relevant anchor text. This will not necessarily directly improve your ratings in the search engines, but it will help make sure that all your content is fetched by the spiders, and indexed by the search engines.
That's it for this article, and by now you should at least have an idea of what SEO is and what methods you should practice in order to boost your rankings in the search engines. Like I mentioned before, there are many aspects that will affect how you are ranked, and I have only touched the most important ones in this article. Be sure to stay tuned for new articles, and subscribe to the
Bloggst Feed (That's an example of good Anchor Text), because now that we've covered the basics, I will delve into more complex aspects of SEO in future aspects.
