PR & Marketing Tips | SEO & Your Blog
admin | Sunday, May 9th, 2010 | No Comments »
There is a lot of talk about search engine optimization (SEO), and rightly so; SEO can greatly assist in your marketing and PR efforts, and may even help to reduce your advertising costs. When using SEO properly, you can increase your traffic and search engine strength without having to spend as much on ad words or other forms of advertising. Here are a few quick tips that I’ve used that have helped my blog traffic grow:
- Optimize titles. Use keywords that people often search for (which you can find from the Google keyword tool). Remember too that new searches are made everyday, and most other blogs and websites don’t optimize for the smaller, less searched for terms. The long tail of the keyword curve needs to be paid some attention. These keywords include three or four word long searches, and can greatly increase your traffic.
- Within the posts themselves use keywords a few times in a blog post, and try to use them at the beginning of the post. Also, try bolding or italicizing them. Google and other search engines periodically send out spiders to sift through your content to use in their search engine results. When users search these engines for content that your website has optimized for, your site will show up higher in the results due to the spiders recordings of keywords that you’ve used.
- Make sure the URL for your post or blog utilizes the best keywords from your title. With Blogger, the URL of a blog post is automatically made from the title of the blog post. More often than not, the title is cut to make the URL shorter. Thus, it makes sense to use critical or more important keywords at the beginning of a post title.
- Optimize images that your blog uses. Spiders cannot “see” images, but they can read the tags, names, and other notes associate with images. As such, name or tag your images with keywords.
- For the overall blog, within the HTML source code, use meta tags. These are also searched by spiders, and show up in search results. Using these tags also gives your site more keyword associations, and allows you to give your site a description in search engine results. Meta tags are added within the portion of your HTML source code, and can be customized to fit your own needs. (Though the spelling is a little atrocious, this blog post offers some clear cut tips for adding meta tags.) Some say that meta tags are part of a ‘keyword stuffing’ technique (where keywords are overused), but I find them to be useful either way.
SEO can take some time, thoughtful planning, and dedication, but the results are great and can help increase your return on investment. Also, WordSell has a great tool here for scheduling articles based on content you want to cover on your blog and keywords you want to touch on.
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