Basic Blogging Lesson – Search Engine Optimization For Beginners

Though there are numerous search engines out there on the internet, only two of them bring traffic the most, Google and Yahoo. After doing a lot of research on the net for a decent ranking of this blog on these two engines, I too got the confidence of writing some “search engine optimization basics for bloggers” for my fellow beginners. Though I haven’t become a “Michigan SEO expert” or haven’t done any doctorate on this subject, but with the truth that only a few surfers look beyond the first or second page of the results displayed by the search engines, any tactic done to reach that top slot, be it by an expert or inexpert, will be welcomed by any beginning blogger. May be MSN and Ask.com are doing their job of bringing traffic with a lesser volume, I just concentrated on Google and Yahoo only. Find below some simplified tips (with less complicated vocabulary) that may be a blessing for a beginning blogger.

Add robots.txt and sitemap.xml files in root directory

These incredibly essential files supported by major search engines are the doorsteps to your website for a search engine crawler and should be placed in the root directory (nowhere else) of your website. They ensure indexing your important site contents while avoiding those files that you deem to be unimportant.

Recent survey indicates that still only 30% of the sites are equipped with these files. Proper use of these files would move up your blog’s index ranking. There are numerous tools available on the net for creating/updating them. Note the formats; the preferred formats are text for robots and xml for sitemap. Never miss the plural (“s”) while creating “robots” and sitemap is a single word. If your blog isn’t having any of these files, act immediately.

Prefer static or dedicated IP for your website

If you are with a shared host, request your host for a dedicated or static IP address for your blog. This means that no one on the net shares this IP with your blog and it is all yours. Many shared servers have incredible number of related sites on them. Having your own IP separates you from those sites.

The above two tips may not be applicable to blogging platforms like blogger/blogspot or WordPress and applies to only paid hosts where you have FTP access.

Sparingly use flash contents

Flash files are quick to download, neat looking and are with interactivity and animation but from SEO point of view, they are just null. As of now, many search engines (except Google, Google is indexing flash files) do not have the ability to index content within a flash file. So even though flash files are good for presentation, they are just a big zero from SEO point of view and hence should be sparingly used.

Prefer HTML text than images for site navigation

Navigation with the aide of images may be appealing and effective once a visitor is on your site but it is not so for the crawlers. This is the common mistake made by bloggers on SEO point of view. Make sure that the important page elements are in HTML text links because of the simple fact that the crawlers are basically only looking at your source code and are interested in keywords with which the links are made. Anything you have put together in an image or any other multimedia component is likely to be invisible to search engines, they are blind! With that in mind, it should be clear that the most important elements of your page, where your core content is, should be presented in clean and optimized HTML source code.

Images must have ALT text for SEO

ALT text is important for accessibility of vision impaired users. Search engines can only see the ALT text and cannot abstract the contents on images, they are blind! They can only see the ALT text content and the association they will make with the image and your relevant content will be based exclusively on this. Do not use your keyword phrase in ALT text. None of the search engines consider ALT text when determining relevancy. ALT text should be used only to describe images.

Add title tags for text links

This is the text that appears when you put your cursor/pointer on the top of a link. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the ALT tag for images.

Check Googlebot activity reports regularly

Log in to your Google webmaster tools account (hope you have added your site by logging into webmaster tools already) and check the Googlebot activity reports by clicking on the manage link of the site you have submitted. You can find the latest Googlebot activities on your site. Apart from many functions available on the webmaster console, you can set the crawl rate at which Googlebot accesses your pages. This is a vital information especially if you are worried that you are on a slow network or having webserver problems. If it is taking a long time for the crawler to index your pages, it may be because that they timeout and stop trying. So if the crawler is unable to call your pages quickly, then the same lag may apply to users in page loading time and we know how impatient the internet users are.

Similarly rectify the crawl errors listed in the “diagnostic” link of your webmaster account. Monitoring and rectifying the crawl errors listed by Googlebot, if any, can help you alleviate trouble indexing content, may be another crawler is having the same trouble.

Optimize your title for human beings

Optimization of title tags is one of the most important points for SEO. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site. Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page of your blog. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

META tags are hidden codes read only by search engine crawlers. They are placed at the top of a page’s source code. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO experts agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were.

Quality content is the king of search engine optimization

With all the aforementioned parameters being positive, then concentrate on the core subject, the content. Quality content is the king of above all points to drive traffic to your site and note that it should be your own and not a clone. Duplicate contents are still the major headaches for spiders and once Googlebot identifies your content as duplicate, gone your ranking and post deep under the rock into the supplemental pages. So write your own content, rich in quality. Every post on your blog should have at least 300 words or more. Do not write a two paragraph post that has little or no real information.

• Write posts that are unique (that you can feel proud of for having created) and fulfill your visitors’ needs first and your own needs second.
• Write contents that are truly relevant (and deserve to be found at the top.)
• Post contents that will meet your visitors’ exact search query and satisfy it.
• Write contents your visitor will be glad that they found.
• Write contents that are written for your specific visitor, so that it flows smoothly and reads well to them.

Use appropriate level of HTML heading

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least h1 to h4 when writing your page. Look at the source code of this post, the title is wrapped with h1 code and the subheadings are wrapped with h2 code and still less important headings up to h4. Instead of bolding the headings, I have wrapped them with these codes. You can do that with the HTML editor window of your WordPress. So instead of bolding your subheadings, wrap them with appropriate level of html heading tags from h1 to even h6.

Be bold. Bold some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is more than enough. Since a page full of bold words would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to write the page with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists and other content with bolding the keywords once or twice. Try to get at least 300 words on each page.

Concentrate on target keywords in content

It would be a waste of time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore try to find the best keywords. There are several tools available on the net to help you find the best keywords. The most popular resources are Google Keyword tool, WordTracker and Overture (Yahoo!). Using the WordTracker’s Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) would have a better chance of higher ranking. Isn’t worth knowing how many people are competing with your keywords before you write a post?

Repetitive use of keywords more than three times may trigger spam filter indicating the search engine that you are trying to spam search results. Also, do not try to stuff the tags with the keywords that are not used in the body of your website that may be taken as another spam technique. I have seen many doing this by stuffing “Britney Spears” into the keywords while the blog/website doesn’t have anything even relating to her great grandparents but just because that the keyword is a hot stuff searched by millions. Isn’t it a deed to mislead both the bots and the surfers?

Ensure custom error page 404

Ensure that your server is returning a 404 error code for broken/dead links or unfound pages. When browsing around a site, we may end up with the blank screen that reads “Error 404, page not found” error. While broken links that point to this page should definitely be avoided, a “custom error page” to replace this page as a next alternative for any surfer to find the missing page is a good idea and is liked by bots too because search engine spiders are programmed to stop following links that generate a blank 404 page. If spiders end up in a section of your site that is down through an old link that you missed, they might not spend the time to index the rest of your site.

For eg., put an absurd URL for this blog after mtherald.com on your browser and see what it returns! It returns a search option and a full sitemap with links encouraging users and bots not to leave the site.

Plug infinite loops

Many use scripting languages such as Perl, php and asp to add interactive functionality to their web pages like comments on blog posts, forums, eCommerce for an online store etc. Scripting is quite frequently used on the internet. Unless you use robots.txt files or take other preventative measures, search engine crawlers can fall into “infinite loops” in these pages. Imagine a script that allows a webmaster to add a calendar to one of his pages. Now, any programmer would base this script on calculations and it would auto-generate each page based on the previous month and a formula to determine how the days and dates would fall. That script depending on sophistication could plausibly extend infinitely into the past or future. Now think of the crawler – it follows links, indexes what it finds, and follows more links. How to stop a crawler from clicking next month in a calendar script an infinite number of times? Not possible, almost impossible. Crawlers are well-built programs that need to run efficiently. As such, they are built to recognize when they have run into an infinite loop situation like this and will simply stop indexing pages at a site that is flagged for this error.

Gain external inbound links

These are the links on other sites, pointing to your site or to individual pages within your site. Google uses PageRank (a mathematical formula) and hypertext-matching analysis to rank your web pages. To get good results with PageRank, you need to get good links from related pages that point to your site. The more the links that point to your site, the better your ranking. The quality of the links is important. A link that contains the keyword for which you want to have high rankings in the link text is better than a dozen links that says with the text “click here.” This can be achieved only with good content writing and someone impressed with your content might refer his visitor to you. Note that search engines nowadays discounts links gained from article directories, carnivals or other cheap directories.

Build internal (on-site) links

These are the links on your site pointing to pages within your site. Search engines give some weight to internal links as far as ranking is concerned but not that much importance as external links. Internal links do help your readers roam around your site. Relevant links within your posts to other post of a similar topic will help you retain your visitor for longer and send them deep inside your site as you know how impatient are surfers jumping from one page to other. Now won’t it be interesting to read the Top Ten Ways To Annoy Your Website Visitors?

Though the points noted above are in no way a complete curriculum of what to do to improve your blog’s search engine ranking, if you focus your efforts on these basic blogging lessons, rest is assured and you will see both an increase in traffic and higher rankings. Even with a closed quote search of this blog on Google a couple of days ago didn’t bring any results (with this blog deep under the earth) and with practice of a few of these tips (not all, since I am weak on inbound links, hope some of you will link me!), now it is springing up decently in some searches.

SEO tips and techniques are ever changing due to changing ranking algorithms of the search engines and these blog optimization techniques too may turn antique down the lane, hence will keep you posted at that point in time. Have you read Google’s Webmaster guidelines? Check it from time to time as things do get updated and are subject to change. With these tips, hope you will admire this blogger at least not as a damager though not as a “Michigan SEO expert!”

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• Tame Crawlers To Obey Your Directives