Many hobby bloggers are unaware of what is under the hood in search engines. They happily type away their articles, maybe decorated by some Adsense blocks and wait for visitors to read and click the ads. At the end of the day they look at their stats and wonder why almost nobody popped in.
Even if you are not keen on high advertising revenues; when you have a blog you want to have someone to read your articles. After all, there undoubtedly is a certain amount of exhibitionism involved in blogging. So you better take measures that your blog is not just another little critter in that giant ant colony that is usually called Blogosphere.
Making yourself more prominent on the net is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Basically, this means tweaking your blog in such a way that you rank higher in the result lists of search engines. If done properly, not only search engnie traffic will increase, but also traffic from other sources.
SEO can be broken down into two main elements:
1. Intelligent Use of Search Keywords in Your Blog
Search engines let people search for keywords. So you have to make sure that you use keywords that are relevant to your blog as often as possible in your writing.
- Use keywords in headlines, tags, categories and meta descriptions
- Use keywords generously in your text, but without overloading it. All SEO tactis is secondary to good readability
- Place the most important keywords as close to the beginning of the article as possible
The better you play the keyword play, the higher you will rank in the search engines.
2. Make Sure Other Sites Link to You
Another important factor in how well you are liked by search engines is the number of backlinks you have, this means sites linking to your blog.
Building up a link network takes time, as you can only control part of the process. Here are just a few things you can do:
- Write comments on other people’s blogs and leave a link to your own blog
- Join forums relevant to your blog niche and add a link to your blog to your signature
- Add yourself to blog directories.
- Participate in blog carnivals
- Submit your articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg or Stumbleupon
- Announce your blog postings on Twitter
The more sites link to you, the higher you will rank in search results. And you will also benefit from people clicking on the links you have left. Perhaps other bloggers will add you to their blogroll, if they like what you write.
This was by no means intended to be an in-depth introduction to SEO, just a quick overview for beginners to get familiar with the term. Fancy things like PageRank or TrustRank were deliberately skipped to keep it as simple as possible.
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i agree with you. good information.