Blogging for money part 3: search engine optimization
Blog Search engine optimization (or SEO), is the process of improving the amount of traffic your blog receives by purposely increasing rankings in search engines. Being able to achieve good rankings is key to your success when blogging for money.
What is blog SEO?
SEO is not a practice that can be easily summed up. Some people devote their entire profession to learning the techniques of search engine ranking, and few (if any) have ever truly been able to crack the code.
The good news is that you don’t need to become an expert or do massive amounts of research to get your blog ranked well in Google! As a matter of fact, Google tells you exactly what you need to do in their webmaster guidelines.
If you skim through their webmaster guidelines, you will discover that good design and content is all you need for successful rankings. Although this is very true, it’s somewhat of an overstatement by Google. Yes, you will receive more lasting traffic with good content and design, but these guidelines were published much to Google’s advantage. Good content is only a small piece of the pie.
Don’t forget that Google is a search engine, and the largest most successful search engine in existence. Their objective is to rank the most relevant, quality sites, and to provide the most positive experience possible for its users. But sometimes Google’s interests conflicts with the interests of the struggling Internet marketer. This is why I recommend observing these three stalwart SEO tactics that have always proved faithful over the past decade.
1. Add meta tags to your blog
Meta tags are simple snippets of code that tell search engines information about your page. Meta tags always go in the header HTML of your page. If you are using Blogger or WordPress, there should be an option for you to edit the meta data of your blog.
There are two meta tags that you need to understand for the SEO of your pages, meta description and meta keywords. Meta description is the line of text that appears under the link to your site in search results. If you search the term ‘Google’ in the Google search engine, the site ranked highest is www.google.com. If you look above the green link, and below the large text link titled ‘Google,’ you will see these two sentences, “Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.” That text is Google’s meta description tag.
To insert a meta description in HTML, simply type:
<meta name=”description” content=”The description of your page here.” />
In-between the <head> and </head> tag of your pages. If you are using a blogging service like Google Blogger or WordPress, there should be an option for you to change this in the administration.
Meta keywords is a bit less important than the description tag. Basically, when search engines were first created, they did not have the advanced spidering capabilities as they do today (they weren’t able to crawl pages to discover what content was on a page). Hence W3 (the World Wide Web consortium), gave webmaster’s the option of telling search engines what their pages were about. They could do this by inserting the meta keywords tag. Now outdated, its influence on rankings is questionable, and most search engines are known to ignore meta keywords. But unless you are trying to hide the keywords that you are targeting from competition, it can’t hurt to put them on your pages!
To insert meta keywords in HTML, simply type:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc.” />
In-between the <head> and </head> tag of your pages. If you are using a blogging service like Google Blogger or WordPress, there should be an option for you to change this in the administration.
Note that every single page or post within your blog should have its own unique meta tags. Google praises pages with unique meta tags, and frowns on pages that use duplicate meta tags.
2. Take advantage of headlines
This one’s a given. Google, and other search engines, look very closely at headlines to determine what your page is actually about. You can use the <h1> tag to laser target search terms. One problem people have with using the <h1> tag is that it’s too big, and that it affects their page cosmetically. This problem can be solved using a simple little CSS trick, but you should check first if you are able to use custom CSS with your blogging service.
Basically CSS (cascading style sheets), defines attributes for text and content of your page. It can alter the size/look of what your page will display as <h1> text.
To do this, simply type:
<STYLE TYPE=”text/css”>
H1 {font-family: The font you want, e.g.: verdana; font-size: The font size you want, e.g.: 12pt; color: the color you want, e.g.: black}
</STYLE>
Into the head of you page.
3. Build honest links to your blog
It’s no surprise Google rebukes people purchasing links from other sites to boost their site rankings. These are the kind of practices that un-foil all of the hard work Google engineers undergo to produce a search algorithm that ranks relevant, quality sites. In Google’s webmaster guidelines, Google tells us to avoid “participating in link schemes,” and to ask ourselves the questions “Does this help my users?” and would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” It’s almost as if Google has ethical convictions about organic site promotion.
At any rate, it does help to obey Google at all times. No, it is not a democracy, its an absolute totalitarian dictatorship and Google is the unquestioned leader. Although it may seem like the tough way out, refraining from forbidden site promotion activities could really help you in the long run. Really, the best way to build links to your blog is by getting links naturally with good content, submitting articles, and building Squidoo lenses.
Ezine is the Most prominent site for article submission, and Helium (a huge community of casual writers) just started allowing embedded links in articles. There are a ton of other sites out there that publish articles for free, and they are all but a Google search away…
As, I mentioned Squidoo is another great way to build quality links to your blog. Squidoo was originally created by a leading Internet marketer who sought to make the process of creating stand-alone web pages easier. It grew rapidly in the year 2007, and has become a necessary tool for search engine optimizers everywhere. Not only can you get great contextual links from lenses (the term for Squidoo articles) for free, but you can also get unprecedented amounts of traffic from individual lenses. This is due largely to the fact that Google had a love affair with Squidoo when it was first created, and has since then rampantly indexed, and ranked pages.
You are now almost to the top of the blogging for money pyramid! Congratulations on making it this far, and please read on to the last (but not least) important step to making money with your blog: advertising. Click here to go back down the pyramid to the frequent blog posting article.
The Blogging for Money Pyramid
Tags: blogging for money
i am a newbie in Search Engine Optimization but i think that the submission of articles in article directories is one of the best ways to gain backlinks. *
The blogging for money pyramid is pretty interesting. My questions is unique and high quality content is definitely the king, can it be popular without doing SEO or Social media? I do not think so.
SEO is very useful for any website , if you want to see your blog one first page of google then this is the best technique.Cherry form my experience i learned i don’t think so there are other ways to become famous.
Thank you for your article, but I don’t think the meta tags are very useful nowadays.
Usually, when I have to optimize websites, I try to change the title (between markups) and first title of the content (between ). It’s much more effective.