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Getting Started With SEO for Bloggers
By Caroline Middlebrook | March 13, 2009
Many people don’t think about SEO in the beginning and believe that it is something that can be saved for a leter time. However this isn’t true because when done properly, SEO would be incorporated into your blog setup and it is much better to think of it from the outset rather than trying to correct mistakes later.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is very valuable for bloggers because search engine traffic doesn’t cost anything and once it begins to flow it can continue for months and even years to come. However it can take a while to get that momentum going.
SEO is all about ranking content in the search engines so of course you need content and this is why blogs can do so well with SEO because they are full of content! However SEO is about keywords and its quite easy to write a blog post that doesn’t rank for any useful keywords and the traffic potential is never reached.
Optimising Your Posts For On-Page SEO
The first step is to know what keywords you want to rank for. Keyword research is a large topic of its own and there is not room to cover it here so if you are not familar with that do a little research first. However, don’t obsess over this because of a blog has to primarily appeal to humans and not just search engines.
But if you’re writing a blog about digital camera’s for example and writing a post about a particular model then it makes sense to optimise that post to the model of the camera as that is something that would be searched on in Google. There are several places where you need to insert your keyword:
1) The title – the title is the single most important factor and you want your keyword as close to the start as possible.
2) The post content – mention your keyword (and variations on it) throughout the post itself. Don’t go overboard though – keep it natural.
3) Tags – If your blogging platform allows you to add tags to your posts then ensure that you add one that matches your keyword.
4) The URL – if you are using WordPress then this is very easy to do because it has a feature to allow you to convert your post title into the URL.
What About Existing Blog Posts?
Even if you have already started your blog and written several posts without SEO in mind there are still some tweaks you can make. One thing you must NOT do is change your URL though as otherwise your blog will start reporting broken links.
However what you can do is change your titles and the copy text in your posts. One mistake that people often make is putting their keywords at the end of their title rather than at the beginning for example if you are targeting the phrase “make money blogging” which is best out of these two titles:
- 10 Great Ways to Make Money Blogging Today! – Make Money Blogging – 10 Killer Ideas!
The latter title is more SEO-friendly as it puts your keywords at the beginning so you can go back and tweak old posts in this way if you like. You can also check through the post itself making sure the keyword appears a few times and if your blogging software supports tags then make sure you tag it with your keyword.
These kinds of changes can take a while to take effect though as Google may not visit your blog very often, especially if it is new.
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