What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is a combination of efforts taken both behind the scenes and on the visible page to "stand out from the crowd" and be seen by search engines when they crawl the web for content. So by taking some of the steps I'll outline below you can help increase traffic to your blog. It doesn't matter what your focus is, the point is you can attract more people to your content just by looking out for the little guy, the web spider.

Why Is SEO Important?

  It just so happens that blogs due to their higher than normal output of content tend to be crawled more frequently than a normal webpage. This opens up a big opportunity to utilize SEO to climb up the page rankings on a given subject. So say you're blogging about a specific sport, so long as you're abiding by the rules that the search engines operate by you'll be getting traffic and gaining page rank above your competitors. Then before you know it you'll start getting comments, RSS subscribers, social media mentions, and be appearing on search engine results pages for your topic. Why you may even have a fully fledged blog on your hands.

Structure Is Important!

I'm going to bash myself here a little and say that I am in fact, doing it a little wrong. I don't have my blog set up to showcase my top articles, this isn't a magazine site so I don't have a "feature article". I'm also a naughty little blogger in that I don't concentrate on one topic, rather than stay strictly on course with Internet Marketing content I do from time to time express a thought or opinion on something that may bother me, don't do that… Says the hypocrite. Bring new readers into the fold who may not be keen on what it is you're all about, your style and the way you get a point across is to show them your hottest topics right off the bat. Make your biggest response getters your "call to action". In other words, place these posts in a place where they get a lot of emphasis and play to the least observant person in the room. Sometimes you really do have to shove things in your visitor's faces in order for them to take notice. Once these hot topics have been pillaged and plundered by your new readers perhaps they'll subscribe and now they'll be getting your new content. One thing I do that you should do is use that little break button. You don't need to have your entire article hanging in the breeze. Why it's down right indecent to do so! The reasoning behind this is that when you force a page break you create a new page just for that article which means more indexing for the web crawler, which is good! There's a reason behind this basic level of structuring. On the outside it seems very basic, you stay on topic and you get better rankings, but it's a little more complex than that. 

Think of your site like a flow chart and you'll start to see it like the search engines do. 

Shown above site map A shows an organized flow of content. Each part is easily accessible and all of the content fits in with its parent category.

Site map B shows a lack of structure. Their content is all over the place and if you look in the bottom right hand corner of the map you can see a section labeled, "News and Events" sounds like a blog could fit in there but what would they talk about and how would a search engine organize something with such a variety of content under one banner? The answer is it wouldn't, you can't talk about every facet of your life and then say you're a cooking expert, see the disconnect?

 There's still structuring to do. You're writing for the web so don't draw out the good stuff for the ending. You're not writing speculative fiction here so the audience wants to know who did it and how right away otherwise, they're going to high tail it back to Facebook. So get the good content out first, and don't forget to use those keywords!

Search engines like it when they see keywords right away so don't skimp and not do your research. SEO professionals will tell you to always make sure your page title is keyword rich, followed by your headers and subheaders, all this is important for search engines to discover you and show you to the world. Don't forget about humans though, SEO is all this stuff about writing for robots, there's even robots.txt to tell the web spiders not to crawl certain parts of your page! More on that in a minute but first things first. Although you need to tune your site and content for SEO and structure accordingly you're writing because you want humans, not robots, to read your material and share it with their friends on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and so on, so don't forget whose team your on.

"Robots"

Back to robots.txt. hang on to something cause this can get a little confusing. Here's a scenario… You have a blog and that blog has 3 writers. All three of you are writing about baseball and so your content category is baseball. Now you're writing about baseball and two of you are doing separate articles on the same game but from different angles. All Google is seeing is "baseball" and so now all of a sudden you've got duplicate content titles "Tampa Bay Rays Vs New York Yankees". Now Google thinks you're just padding your keywords and your rank sinks down because you didn't place your robots.txt on those separate authors sections. Robots.txt tells search engines (Yahoo! Bing, Blekko, who ever…) to stay out. Robots.txt is your older brother or sister and the search engine spider is you trying to get in their room when you were kids, it's just not going to happen and eventually you go off and find something else to do. Everybody walks away healthier for it. 

Keeping Your Blog Content Optimized For SEO

"Welcome to blogging for SEO boot camp! From now on you are SEO soldiers and you will use trending keywords in the body copy of your blog articles! Doooo you get me?!"

  As you go from the top of a blog to the bottom there's plenty of text and content to be optimized for search engines. Starting with the title tag, the title tag does not need to be the literal title of your blog. It can and should be keywords relevant to your article. Don't make it overly verbose, search engines prefer their meals to be brief and concise. 

Headers!

 No! Not those headers!

We all like to have fun with our headers and come up with witty little remarks that tantilize our readers but utilizing relevant keywords pays off.  Like I said before write for humans and write conversationally. No one wants to read "Beep-boop! I am a robot please index me search engine Beep!" Cover all of your bases use meta tags for description and keywords. 

"But Matt Google says bluh bluh bluh meh! Google!! Buh?!" 

Is Google the only search engine in existence? No they're not. They're big yes, and it's good to pander to them but if you're starting a new blog you want to do everything you possibly can to get eyes on your page and attract new readers, heck, any readers! Don't worry though you won't have to teach yourself multitudes of HTML to tweak your meta tags there are plenty of plugins to help navigate you through the confusing stuff. Most of the time they'll even do a lot of the grunt work for you especially when it comes to meta tags for descriptions and keywords. This is the SEO plugin I'm using currently I love it and it's still in beta. I can't give it a 100% run out and download and install it reccomendation yet but it is pretty good. 

Pictures, Videos, MEDIA! SEO?

Digital Asset Optimization is actually one of the more painless SEO operations you can do to get your site's content noticed. In my previous article, The Down Low on DAO I discussed ways to optimize the content you normally don't associate with optimization. Video is a great example. Say you've got a video of you making your famous rump roast that you made to teach your office workers your magical recipe and hey you also happen to be a foodie and a blogger. Why not take that video and tie it into an article? You've suddenly got social proof that you actually know what you're talking about not to mention you've got additional SEO mojo working for you. If you've got the video hosted on your blog site and Google that's twice the chances that you'll be indexed for a video on creating a great rump roast. Plus through YouTube you can also gain subscribers who can then spread your video for you and whom you can direct back to your blog for even more traffic! The same scenario applies to photos and using sites like Flickr.com. Host your photos on your site, tag them with relevant keywords relating to your subject, utilize the alt text for even more SEO mojo, and then upload to Flickr.com to increase the chances your blog will come up during an image search. For alternative media like podcasts meta descriptions are your friend and then don't forget to submit to iTunes for increased publicity for your blog site.

The More You Know!

It has been said it's not what you know but who and now more than ever that may be true. The prevailing wind has been to just throw your content out into the wilds of social media and the people will carry it to the fellows like Moses coming down from the mountain with his ten commandments. Yeah, that sounds good, in theory. In reality people aren't just relying on their friends for content on social networks, they're searching for it.

By tuning your shareable content that you publish to social networks and making it search friendly you dictate the tempo of the dance. You can find out what the trending keywords are that are in use to hammer out content that gets found by the audience your after. Years from now when everyone realizes that by using keywords to get to the people they want we may look back and wonder why we all relied on such grade school approaches to spreading a message, yet it works, so who am I to judge. We certainly cannot debate the power of social media and say that it's a fad and will go away. Not after the recent events in the middle east. 

Then there's Twitter, the Internet's mega phone. Did you make a new blog post? Tweet it! I will as soon as I finish this article. The great thing about Twitter is that it uses hash tags so you can bring SEO to the Twittersphere with you. Find out what the trending topics and keywords are that are in use RIGHT NOW for what it is you're posting about and jump on board. Use the hash tag that's apart of a conversation that matches your message, you're sure to find many kindred spirits that want to consume and share your material. 

Finally don't forget about the directories like Technorati and it's brethren. Directories still have a lot of pull and by following the SEO for text rules there you're sure to push your blog and your agenda towards the front of the line, if not the front. 

Closing Time…

 SEO is a lot like the song "Closing Time" in it there's a line that goes, "Open all the doors and let you out into the world…Turn all the lights on over every boy and every girl." There's a variety of ways to fine tune your SEO and get your blog noticed so open all the doors and let your blog out into the world, but be diligent because nothing happens overnight…. yet.