On Page Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog

I have never bothered with SEO till now. I did not bother about finding the right keywords and getting links. And I am paying a price for it now as this blog has the lowest of the low in the SE rankings although this blog does get regular traffic from other sources, such as social bookmarks and article directories. Well, it is never too late to learn. So here I am starting to pick up some simple SEO strategies and I have consolidate the information to share with you.

One thing you have to realize is no matter how well you can write, if no one reads your blog, you are dead in the water. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog, or any websites you have for that matter. So we have established the fact that good content is important as well as traffic. So how to get traffic to your blog?

Try thinking backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like google, yahoo and msn to name a few. So, to get these people to visit your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. Your blog will never be found if you are at page 50 or page 100. Your blog has to be at least the first few pages to be found by these people.

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization or SEO. This is a very complex and hard subject to master. There are SEO experts who get paid thousands just to get their clients’ site on the top of the search engines. However, that should not stop us from using simple SEO techniques to get some SE traffic. We do not want compete with the big guns, such as Amazon.com. They are literally at the top of any SEs. But what we want to target is less competitive keywords. For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so.

Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That’s more manageable, but you’d like to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadget” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML!

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the

and

tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the

tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic.

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and drop your ranking further down into oblivion… So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!