This article is written by Rhys Wynne - a six year blogger who also runs his own Webmaster Tips Newsletter at My Brand New Brand, Subscribe Today for free extras!

S.E.O.

Three letters that everybody is going crazy over on the internet. Do this, don’t do this, and people will come streaming in from search engines willing to throw cash and ladies at you.

Sorry, I don’t agree with it.

With blogs, whilst SEO is important, in the majority of niches you should really focus on your readers rather than search engine positions. Guys like John Chow rank nowhere in search engines. So how can he make $30,000 a month?

Simple, by writing for readers (or - in his terms - getting other people to write for his readers).

Here are some things I’ve noticed which you could be doing wrong. Well, they’re not wrong, but I find them offputting as it reads to me like you are putting search engine’s first.

Overly SEO’d titles
Titles shouldn’t be 3 or 4 lines explaining exactly what you are doing in the article. Titles should be brief, clever and eye catching. Whilst Titles are crucial for SEO purposes, a long title may not only appear offputting for readers, but also get you penalised in search engines.

Furthermore, if your page has more than 1 h1 tag on it, there’s a chance that the second one will be ignored. H2-H6 tags are there for a reason.*

Confusing Internal Backlink Structure
Everybody’s seen those blogs with random words linked for Search Engine Optimisation benefit. People will follow them, and Google will follow them. People will be confused, and google will give you a slight benefit. Sure, link to your own stuff, but it should either be a lead in (such as “I wrote about Search Engine Optimization here”), or even a simple “Click Here”. Just don’t confuse your readers.

Getting Rubbish Rank Instead of Real Readers From Forums
This is a lesson that I learnt recently whilst promoting Retro Garden. To aid promotion, I joined a bunch of video game and retro game forums to participate in discussions there. Immediately I put my forum signature as a keyword rich link. I didn’t see any benefit. I changed to an image based signature and - whilst losing on search engine traffic, I got more clickthroughs and readers.

Not all forums allow this, but if you see other people use images in footers, why not you use one too, especially if you contribute?

So it sounds like I don’t do any SEO on my blogs. You couldn’t be further from the truth, I do SEO on my blogs, but I’m not SEO for the sake of my readers.

You got any S.E.No-No’s to share with the group?

First I have to say that I am by no means a SEO expert, but I do know blogging. Improving your blog for search engines has never been easier for bloggers. It just takes a little bit of work. In the last month we’ve received 1,400 visitors from Google alone.

What Exactly is SEO?

When I first started blogging, I didn’t even know what SEO was.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.

The better your website is prepared and “optimized” for search engines, the more traffic you should get. Here is how you can improve your blog and start using basic SEO methods to improve your rankings.

Change the URL Permalink Structure

It’s important for your blogs URL to include at least the post title. Basic Wordpress default settings give your blog, example, “yourblog.com/p=1″. This not only hurts your SEO, but makes your blog look unprofessional. You can customize your post URLs to have whatever you like.

To change the settings, go to your Options tab in the Wordpress dashboard. Then select permalinks. To have your post link just have the post title, go to custom and enter /%postname%/.

I recommend to do this very early with your blog. By changing the URL structure, your blog will need to be re-indexed for the right URLs. If I changed my permalink structure now, people searching my blog would get errors because the URL for each post would be different.

Install the All In One SEO Wordpress Plugin

This is an essential (and easy) Wordpress plugin for any blog. This plugin allows you to perform basic important SEO techniques with your blog. You can change the title and description to whatever you want. This is what the search engines will see. You can also tag your post with keywords which is also very important for search engines.

If you haven’t downloaded the All in One SEO plugin, you can do so here.

Blog Your Key Term

Pick relevant key terms for your blog and use them. The obvious best way to start ranking for the key terms you select (at least longtail) is to blog about them. Make sure to include the key terms in your title, post and tags.

My post, 10 Quick Blogging Tips, helped me start ranking for “blogging tips” and other key phrases similar to that.

Build Links With Your Key Terms

To get better rankings for your key terms you need to promote it. I’ve had bloggers link to this blog with keywords like blogging tips and blogging tools. I’ve used this technique for link exchanges and leaving comments.

Of course the alternative is to buy links. However this can be costly. You also don’t want to go and get 1,000 links within the same key term in one day. This could ultimately ban you from search engines, or for that particular term. SEO can be a slow process, but rewarding.

Comment on Blogs - Do Follow / Top Comments

Commenting on blogs can not only drive traffic and subscribers to your blog, it can also help with basic SEO.

By commenting on blogs with “do follow” or a top commenter list, you can build easy links with whatever key term you chose. This is how I gained better rankings for key terms like increase website traffic and blogging tips.

An important rule here is to NOT SPAM. All the comments I left were on-topic and provided value to the article and comment section.

Courtney Tuttle has the infamous Do-Follow List where you can find tons of blogs that give you SEO juice. There are over 200 websites/blogs that are now on the “D List”.

How have you incorporated basic SEO into your blog?

Traffic from search engines is the blogging gift that keeps on giving. You can find yourself receiving a steady flow of new visitors to your blog each day once you have a post ranking high in search engine results. Of course, it’s not easy to get on the first page of Google for a search term so you need to think creatively. I have an idea that can help.

Every day millions of people search for solutions to their tech support problems. This is a golden opportunity for you drive new visitors to your blog. Simply write a post detailing a computer problem you are familiar with and offer up the solution. Post it and forget about it while the Google crawler works its magic on your behalf.

Here’s a real world example from my own blog. Almost a year ago I ran into a problem with an Access database. I eventually realized the problem was with an Internet Explorer setting (of all things) so I wrote a short 100 word post about it called Access Files Located on an “Untrusted Site” and moved on with my life.

Lo and behold, over the course of a few weeks my post slowly rose in the ranks of Google searches. As of today, it’s on the first page of results for a variety of searches related to Access and “untrusted site” error messages. The post receives new and unique visitors each day from search engines. I’ve since gone on to write a number of posts containing tech support solutions that now account for about 40% of my incoming traffic.

This idea doesn’t require you to write long posts or have a lot of technical knowledge. A lot of these problems and their solutions can be found online already. Just keep these two things in mind when writing your post:

• Be smart about your post title. Use keywords you think people will use in their search results. It’s a good idea to use words or phrases from any error messages the problem contains if possible.
• Keep your description of the problem and its solution clear and concise. People want a fix for their problem and not more confusion and frustration.

Helping people solve their computer problems is a simple way to generate natural traffic to your blog. In fact, you could probably start a brand new blog offering nothing but fixes and solutions for any software package on the market today and have traffic rolling in. It just takes a little patience as the search engine spiders crawl and index your posts.

As niche blogs become even more popular, the reliance on google for bloggers is at a new and different high. Much of the traffic for certain niche blogs come from search engines, mainly google. So when (and how much) does google crawl you?

SeoMeter

Add your website to SeoMeter, and start to keep track of search engine’s crawling!

SeoMeter allows you to monitor when search engine’s crawl your website or blog. Getting listed is free and the tool records in the database how often you get crawled.

You can see on our badge that our CC or crawl cycle is .9. The CC is the time between two consecutive crawls done by search engine robots. So if our crawl cycle was 1, that means we get crawled once a day.

You can also notice our rank, which I thought was pretty cool. You can check out the top 20 websites in blogging. Looks like we are in the top 5.

Why Does this Matter?

SeoMeter puts it simply and states that this

“allows webmasters to monitor their website’ crawling activities, and to collate crawling trend against their ongoing marketing campaign and other SEO strategies.”

However, I’m just more fascinated on graphs and how much the trends change over time. This gives you different things to check your experiments. Maybe you start posting more or less. It could affect your search engine referrals.

What determines search engine’s crawl rate is best outlined at the SEOmeter blog. The factors include content updates, pinging, sitemap, robots.txt and server speed.

How often do you get Crawled?

Some bloggers have ignored both PPC and SEO. Time spent on search engine optimization (SEO) or PPC (pay per click) can improve your blog as well as make you more money.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO can be done by simply writing a post with optimizing your titles. We rank very well for posts that were made months ago, some aren’t even relevant to our blog. Before Spiderman 3 even was released, we made a post with an image. That image continues to generate a few 100 searches per month.

The most difficult thing to start with is to figure out which keyterms are right for your blog. You have to be realistic and think which terms will get you the most traffic, that are attainable. We’ve chosen keywords that include blogging, such as blogging tips and blogging tools. For several of our keyterms we’ve been able to reach pages 1-3, which also helps us rank for the longtail keywords.

Pay Per Click

This is the more costly effort, however it can drive the most traffic based on your budget. When using PPC management you want to drive traffic to your website or post that will in turn make you money. Whether it’s a post with an affiliate program, or ads that pay.

This works well for specific niche sites when the amount you get when an ad is clicked is high. By starting with a smaller budget, you can figure what earns you money and what doesn’t.

Organic search traffic is essential for any blog that is hoping to monetize with ad programs like Google Adsense, Text Link Ads, etc. Search Engine Optimization plays an important role in garnering your share of search engine traffic. How a search engine perceives your site is very crucial in this.

In our day to day blogging we link out to several sites. Search engines follow these links (unless you specify rel=nofollow tag) and assumes you give a positive vote to the site you have linked to. Likewise, other sites link to your site as well. Depending on the quality of the site you are linking to or the site linking to you, your search engine ranking can be affected.

So, how do you go about checking for good links and bad links in your blog?

Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker

This excellent tool scans the url you provide and checks for bad links and flags problem areas in your site. After it has scanned all the links in your site, it shows the total number of links, number of unique links and number of questionable links.

Here are a few things this tool shows:

• Link Density: It refers to the number of links in a single page. A high number of links (over 100) in a single page will be looked at as a red flag according to Google Webmaster Guidelines.
• Bad Neighborhood Warning: The tool shows a warning if your blog has an anchor text in a link to a usually spammy industry like sex, gambling or pharmaceutical. This is probably just a false warning. For example, my post titled ‘Check for Sex offenders in your area’ threw a warning flag even though it was a genuine post.
• Blog Spam: If a page you have linked to is in a domain which is appearing as a link from a lot of blogs, it could be indicative of blog comment spamming. My recent link to buymybrokenipod.com was flagged with this. In fact, my links from Blog About Your Blog is flagged as Blog Spam by this tool as I contribute as an author as well as a commentator quite often.
• 404 Not found: A handful of these isn’t usually a problem. To a search engine, a site that returns a lot of 404 errors would means lower trust factor. So, you may need to check the 404 errors in your site and correct the errors.

As you can see, this tool is not 100% fool proof but it can give you a very good overall idea of who you are linking to and how a search engine spider will look at your blog. For eg. my archives page has links to all my previous posts and shows 306 links. I had previously used robots.txt file to stop the bots from spidering this page but I’ll have to recheck if it’s still working.

Also, check out my previous post on Free tools to Check the Health of Your Blog.

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous and incremental process. Tools such as the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker can be a great addition to your toolbox that help with making your blog a little bit more optimized.

I would love to hear about any other tools you use in the pursuit for SEO nirvana! Drop a comment below if you have one.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la - where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable. (RSS)

For a long time I didn’t bother to try to “optimize” this blog for search engines. I didn’t really know anything about it, and it all seemed to complicated. I’m sure now there are more “tricks” that can be done here, but we get pretty steady incoming google traffic. We got well over 1,000 searches last month alone.

Keyword Targeting

This has to be the hardest thing to figure out, once you know what keywords to go after it isn’t that difficult. We’ve chosen such keywords as blogging tips.

Promote your Keyword

Once you’ve figured out which search term you want to rank for, then it’s time to go after it. The easiest thing you can do is blog about the keyword you are targeting. Make sure to include it somewhere in the title. If you have a unique URL, you may want to target a keyword in it. It has helped our rankings that we have “blog” in our name.

Building Links with your Keyterm

The best way to rank on a search engine for a certain term is to get linked to it by multiple websites. There are many ways to do so.

First you can obviously pay for links. Make sure to target blogs and websites that are indexed in google, and ideally have pagerank. I have a small blog network that I’ve used to help people rank for certain key terms at a low cost.

Secondly you can ask people who have added you to their blogroll to change their links. On some blogs our anchor text is Increase Website Traffic and on others it may be Blogging Tips.

Don’t forget about the do-follow bloggers. These links apparently don’t carry much weight, but it does give you a link.

The most effective thing that you can do is become a top commentor on as many blogs as you can (don’t spam!!!). Not only will this build backlinks to your blog, but you’ll be getting tons of links with your keyterm. Make sure to use your keyword as your “name” when leaving a comment. I’ve compiled my own list of sites that use top commentors, however there is a public list of top comments at Web360. There is roughly 20 blogs listed that use the top comments. The majority of these blogs have low amount of comments so it should generally take a few comments to get listed, which should take less than a few minutes.

With the top do-follow and top comment method we ranked on page #1 for increase website traffic in under a month (2-3 weeks).

You have a blog and you have been studiously writing useful posts and steadfastly replying to your readers’ comments. You have a good habit of linking to fellow bloggers and get delighted when someone links to you. You have also been working to get your posts to appear in search engines.

All these actions are very commendable and you will be rewarded for your efforts in time. But, it is good to check the overall health of your blog in terms of SEO, backlinks, Google Pagerank, etc. Here are a couple of ways to get a quick overlook of your blog’s health.

Website Grader

Website Grader is very easy to use. You just enter your blog URL, keywords you want to get metrics on and enter a competitors website to get a comparison and hit submit. Website Grader crawls the web and gathers all sorts of information about your website and gives you a nice report with some suggestions to implement.

Some of the points, it reports on:

• Score: It gives you a measure based on all the other facts. Useful to compare other sites and yours over time as you implement improvements.
  
• Score Summary: This section gives you nice overview of stats like Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, Google Inbound Links, Yahoo Inbound Links, Delicious Saved Count, Google Indexed Pages.
• Web Page Structure: Shows your current title, description and Meta keywords in use. Very important for SEO and has a link to a great article to learn more on this topic. Also, looks to see if you utilize Google Analytics.
• Domain Info: Shows you when and whom you registered with and when your domain name is expiring. It’s worth it just for that. Never let your domain name expire.
  Plus, it also checks to see if you domain redirect enabled as search engines regard www.shankrila.com and shankrila.com as 2 different websites and you would be diluting your link juice.
• Heading and Image Summary: Gives you a good idea about the headings and images a search engine will see in your site.
• Google Indexed Pages: It is pretty important to generate a Sitemap for your blog and submit it to Google so it can index your site. You can also see the pages in Supplemental Index as a high number might indicate duplicate content in your site. WordPress blogs encounter this often as there are more ways to get to post and Google doesn’t know that.
• Search Ranking: You can see how rank for the keywords you were going for if you are in the top 100. Or you will see a ranking of 100+.
• Pro Feature: You get all the above features for free but with a pro account you can compare your previous runs in this site to get a historical data. I think the free service is more than enough for most personal blogs.

For a free service, this tool is excellent and gives you a great overall picture of the health of your blog.

Xinu

Xinu is like Website Grader but it is more focused on providing a quick view of a lot of stats in one page in an easy to read layout. But, it provides fewer recommendations but more metrics than Website Grader.

Xinu was developed by an individual but the source code has been made public for anyone to use. It is available for download and it can be hosted by anyone. One such hosted spot where you can go to use it is Xinu Returns.

Let’s look at some of the metrics Xinu has to offer:

• Diagnosis: This is where you will see a few recommendations on your URL, title, keywords, description, html size, html tags and favicon.
• Domain: Your IP address, online time, author and country information.
• Ranking: Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority and Rank, Alexa and DMOZ ranking.
  
• Syndication: Shows RSS subscriber numbers, visitors and Bloglines subscribers.
• Social Bookmarks: Shows the number of your pages bookmarked in a few popular social bookmarking services.
• Validations: Shows XHTML, CSS and RSS validations and errors if any.
• Indexed pages: Shows number of pages indexed by Google, Google Images, Yahoo and MSN Live.
• Backlinks: Shows the number of backlinks for your blog as seen by a variety of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Alexa, Live, Technorati, Webcrawler, Clusty, Orange, Lycos, Altavista, AlltheWeb, Ask Jeeves, & HotBot.

As you can see, you can use Xinu alongside Website Grader and get a nice overview of your blog’s health. Writing great posts are essential but it is good to monitor the health of your blog periodically just to make sure you are in the right track.

I hate to repeat this cliche but a blog is like a living plant. You have to nurture it, water it, prune it and take care of it and over time you will reap the fruits of your labor.

I would love to hear your Website Grader scores and any qyestions you may have about increasing your scores and in turn the overall health of your blog.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la - where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable.

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