Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of altering your blog so that it gets ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. This being the HUNDREDTH POST of this blog I thought of doing a top-to-bottom SEO of my blog and in the process involve my readers also in optimizing their blogs. So login to your Dashboard and follow me on this comprehensive approach to optimize your blog.....
Before we start make sure you have reliable statistics about your current website traffic. You’ll want to compare performance of the site before and after
the optimisation has been carried out. You can do this by comparing statistics from any traffic counters you have installed in your blog.
STEP 1 - CHOOSE YOUR KEYWORDS.
A keyword is a word that best describes your web page. Before you even create your blog you have to choose your keywords. This is because you have to put them in the URL/Link you make in creating a new blog. Do not give your own name to your blog url unless it is already an easily recognized brand name. If you have not made it into a brand name it will not attract any traffic. Our objective in SEO is to attract as much traffic as possible.
Choose a subject you are going to blog about and research your keywords as shown in Keywords Tips and Tricks for Bloggers.
Primary keywords are the main keywords from which all keyword variations should derive. Your primary keywords should focus on your subject and not be too specific. Secondary Keywords are those which reference related subjects. For example if your Primary Keywords are Search engine Optimization then the Secondary Keywords will be Cascading Style Sheets, Web Design etc. Make a list of at least 500 words since you will be putting them in various parts of the blog title, headings, links, content and image tags.
Your blog URL should be made of the primary keyword which best describes your blog.
Check the availability of the URL and put your best keyword or keyword phrase in it. You can also combine your keywords into a phrase to put in your URL.
STEP 2 - THE TITLE TAG.
This is the second step while creating your blog. Do not give a title like "Welcome to my blog" and if you have such a title change it immediately to one showing the subject like "How to ...". Do not use words like AND which are considered as filler words. Instead use the pipe symbol as in "Bank Loans | Where To Find The Best Terms in the USA". Use your Primary Keywords first and then your Secondary Keywords. The recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 60 including spaces.
In Blogger you can go to Settings----->Basic----->Title to set this tag. On the Edit Html tab it is represented by
<TITLE><data:blog.pageTitle/></TITLE>
Do not just put keywords in the title. It should be made of keyword phrases otherwise it will be considered as spam by search engines. In Blogger Blogs on opening a particular post the title is made of the "Blog Title : Post Title". Hence use your keywords in Post Titles also. The post title should be relevant to the content in the post. Do not use ALL CAPS in your titles as they become difficult to read.
STEP 3 - THE META TAGS.
The Meta tags are the Description Metatag and the Keyword Metatag and are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags usually the description first and then the keywords metatag. They look like this :
Description Meta:
<META NAME="description" content="Your most important keyword phrases should appear in this description.">
Keywords Meta:
<META NAME="keywords" content="keywords phrase 1, keyword phrase 2, keyword phrase 3, etc.">
Do not repeat keywords more than 2-3 times in these tags otherwise it is considered as spaming. Your Keywords Meta should not exceed 1024 characters including spaces. Also your Description Meta tag should not exceed 250 characters including spaces. You can use plurals and misspelt words within the keywords tags. The keywords in them should also be found within the content of your blog.
There is one more metatag in Blogger - META Robots Tag. The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites like Blogspot.
<meta content='index,follow' name='robots'/>
This instructs the search engine spiders to follow all the links and index the blog. If you want it to be a private blog put NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW instead.
STEP 4 - THE CONTENT.
Each Post is made of the Post title, The content and The Tags at the bottom of the post. The Post Title should include the primary keywords and correspond to the content of the post. The title should be enclosed in Headings tags. Preferably post titles should be in bold. Each post should contain 200 to 300 words. This text should include your most important keyword phrases, but should remain logical & readable. Daily adding of relevant content is a priority. If not possible at least weekly. Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Use your
secondary keywords in the body of your post. Do not repeat the keywords too often. Keyword density should be between 4 to 8%. It’s most important to have them in the first 200 and last 200 words of the content. Make them BOLD or ITALIC. Do not use DUPLICATE CONTENT. Do not repeat content internally within the blog in different posts. Do not repeat content externally in other blogs. Do not copy content from other sites. Besides copyrighting issues Google will penalize sites having duplicate content.
Your content should be fresh and updated. It should also be relevant to the blog theme. If it is a blog about football any other widely disparate content will attract attention. Do not use "DIRTY CONTENT" if it is not an adult blog. That will cause the search engines to put your blog in a different category.
STEP 5 - HEADINGS.
The H tags are important starting with the lowest number, making the H1 tag the most important. Put all post titles and headings within these tags.
Put the primary keywords within these tags. Your headings and the content below them should match each other.
STEP 6 - IMAGES.
Your images should be small resolution so that the page loads fast. Do not use BMP images as they are big and load slowly. Name your images with your primary keywords. Use primary keywords within the ALT tags of images. They tell spiders and screen readers what that image is about. Do not cram a bunch of keywords into the "alt" attribute. Use no more than 2-3 per image. Use misspellings and plural keyword phrases here. Alternative text values should not exceed 80 characters in length. While naming images use dashes (-) when separating words. Dashes tell search engines that the word is separated. Underscores (_) tell search engines to read it as a whole.
STEP 7 - LINKS.
Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links. These are the words you highlight in the Post before clicking on the Link icon to enter the URL. Include your most important keyword phrases in the text that immediately preceeds, or follows the the hyperlink. The area round any link is more sensitive and the search engine spiders pick up the words from there. Do not overdo it and make sure that the text is readable.
Use an additional text navigation bar in the top, left or right areas of the blog in that order. The spiders go over your page in the order it is coded.
If you place the left sidebar code above your main column then it is the first to be spidered. An internally well-linked to document is considered as more important.
Use both internal links and external links. Refer to your other blog posts by inserting their links within your post. External links are important when they are from better Page Rank sites. One way links are weighed more heavily than reciprocal links.
STEP 8 - LOADING SPEED.
Your blog should be fast on its feet. There should not be any flash, Multimedia, Javascript or frames delaying the loading process. Search engines do not crawl Javascript produced content as it does not produce html. Search engines do not index framed pages. Use the Website Speed Test to see how fast your blog loads : http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test. It is also a good idea to use HTML links in the top-level main navigation on each of the pages of your site. Your web page should load in 10 seconds. Go to Blog Settings----->Formatting------>Show _ Posts on main page. Put this number as between 1 to 5 and save settings. Your blog will now load faster. Check your blog loading speed at
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
STEP 9 - SITEMAPS AND CODE OPTIMIZATION.
For Blogger there is no need to upload any sitemap files. When submitting the sitemap to Google use the Metatag method outlined in How to Submit to Google. Use CSS layouts instead of table layouts. This enables the search engine spiders to reach the content faster as they have less code to go
through. Get your code validated at http://validator.w3.org/ because if there is an internal code conflict it may halt the search spiders.
STEP 10 - REPEAT ALL ABOVE STEPS.
SEO is a technique which is applied after creating content and not during it. You have to repeat it from time to time so as to tweak your blog to be optimized and rise in the search engine results also called SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). There are some important things which you should not do to attract the spiders but that is the subject for another article.
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