This post would tell you how to drive targeted traffic to your blog and maintaining it successfully through SEO - Search Engine Optimization techniques. How does SEO help your blog and how does search engines functions? Are all Google, Yahoo and MSN…use the same algorithm? No, that is the reason why you need to SEO your blogs with different ways to get your posts and results quickly indexed in all search engines.
1. Keyword Optimization:
The use of relevant keywords in blog posts is one of the most common and also one of the simplest ways to optimize search engine ranking. It will increase your ranking if you use commonly searched words like for example: If you have a gardening site, you might want to use the word “Home gardening” or maybe even “House-keeping” more in your posts. As a result, when people actually type those phrases in the search box, your website is shown earlier because of the use of it in your web page is higher than the rest.
TIP : Don’t ever overdo it.
2. Get Link Love:
Many search engines (almost all) rank your site on basis of the number of back links that lead to your site. Now basically you could do link-exchange. But search engines will rank you even higher if you get one-way links. It’s simple: The more back links one has, the more earlier is his page displayed in the search results.
TIP: Try and get as many as One-way links . It’s always more effective than link exchange.
3. Use Image Tags to your Advantage:
Bloggers should also be aware that any pictures used on their blog can be used to improve search engine rankings with some search engines. This aspect of search engine optimization is often overlooked because many bloggers believe the pictures are not viewed by search engines. While this is true the search engines do crawl the code of the blog in addition to the content on the blog. This means the search engine will view the information provided in the image tags. Bloggers can take advantage of this by using the image tags to provide relevant keywords which can bolster search engine rankings. However, care should be taken to ensure the keywords used in these tags also accurately describe the image because blog visitors will often see the text included in these tags when they scroll over a picture on the blog.
TIP: Make sure that the tag is applicable to the picture.
4. Sitemaps are Necessary:
All websites need sitemaps. Why? Well, every sitemap has links to all the pages in a website and it helps search engine spiders gain even more easier access to your content. And it’s obvious that if more content is tracked by the SE spiders, the more results appear.
TIP: Well, try and go for a more simpler design for your sitemap and don’t go making it too difficult to access your previously posted content.
5. Search Engine Friendly URL’s:
Using Search Engine friendly URL’s like http://www.yourdomain.com/category/SEO will be more effective than the long ones. Why? Well long URLs are most likely to be considered as spam by search engines and users. Keep it brief. Don’t be under the impression that longer URLs will impress your visitors. Users generally despise those kind of addresses. It’s not tough to make the change, and frankly the faster you shift to Search Engine friendly URL’s the better.
TIP: To make the URL change, I’d generally recommend Permalinks Migration Plugin.