Blogging SEO 101: Get Started With SEO – Part I

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Search engine optimization seems to get more popular by the hour. As the state of economy stays dire, as it has been in the past few months, many bloggers are cutting their monthly budgets and spending more time researching on free ways to drive traffic to their blogs. Search engine optimization is one of those ways. Many bloggers just assume that you have to be some technical genius to optimize your website for the search engines. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is as a blogger there are simple steps you can take to increase your traffic from the search engines and take your blog to the next level.

How to Get Started with Blogging SEO

In order to optimize your blog for search engines, you need to focus both on on-page and off-page factors. The on-page factors are those that involve you making changes on your site, to your code. Off-page pages involve incoming links and your social media efforts. With that in mind, here are a few simple steps you can take to optimize your blog for SEO:

1. Content: since you are not trying to be one of those folks who optimize splogs for SEO, you want to make sure you provide real value to your readers in your blog posts. That’s not just good practice. It’s really the only way you can sustain a high level of traffic over a long period of time.

2. Title Tag: using your core keyword phrase in your title goes a long way towards helping you getting ranked for that term. It’s one of the most important on page factors.

3. URL: having your keyword phrase in your URL also helps you get a push on the search engine results pages. It’s very simple to do if you are using a content management system such as Wordpress.

4. Special tags: using special tags such as h1 and B tags can help you even more with your rankings. These tags give engines a better indication on what’s important to you on each and every page.

5. Keywords: the most important part of your SEO strategy. There are plenty of tools that you can use to do your keyword research and find those that people are searching for. Services such as WordTracker and Wordze come in very handy. You can also use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to do some basic keyword research done.

6. Links: linking to your own content should be a big part of your strategy. Your internal links do matter and can help search engines find and index more of your pages. Don’t forget about the text you use in your links! Use the keyword you want that page to get ranked for, and you’ll be off in the long run. You should also take time to link to authority sites from your site. Being associated with top authority sites never hurts, and while you may not get a link back from them, your readers will appreciate those links.

7. Long-tail: a guerrilla marketing tactic that I have been using for a few years now. You may ask, why would I want to get ranked for a term that only 100 people are searching for per month. Those terms are less competitive, easier to rank for, and your traffic adds up as long as you optimize for enough of them.

8. Inbound Links: don’t forget to submit your blog to directories such as E-zine Articles, Isnare, and more. You should also consider blog directories such as AllTop. All these links count one way or another (though you want to focus on the Yes Follow ones).

9. Social Media: using the social media to get links back to your site is a great way to push your content and get more traffic. Make sure to take advantage of Twitter, Facebook, and other sites to increase your traffic for free. Don’t forget to ask your readers to help you out.

10. Plugins: not a SEO tip, but you are always better off using blog enhancements to get the above steps down. There are plenty of plugins for Wordpress and other systems that help you optimize your titles, create a sitemap, and modify your URLs easily. It just doesn’t make sense to spend time doing all these steps by hand.

There you have it. 10 steps to help you get started with SEO on your blog. There are plenty of other tactics you can employ to climb the search engine rankings, which is why you should come back for the second part of this post.

You may also be interested in reading:

• Search Engine Optimize Your Blog with All-in-One SEO Plugin
• How To: Future Proof Your Blog for SEO
• How To Optimize Your Blog with WebSite Grader
• 5 Cool Social Search Engines For Digging Up Info
• 10 Ways To Dominate New Google Search As a Blogger