How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines

How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines

Tip 1: Your Blog Post Titles Have Two Audiences

You've no doubt read that you need to make your blog post titles "search engine friendly," but doing so often kills the creativity and initial appeal of your writing. Instead of trying to appeal to your loyal readers and Google at the outset, approach the two difference audiences in separate stages.

Stage One – Your initial blog readers

Your initial audience is likely going to be those that have already subscribed to your blog's RSS feed–or happen to check your blog every day. They want to be thrilled, excited, and given a reason to not only read your post, but also share and link to it.

When you first publish your blog post, follow this advice:

Make your post title interesting – it could be that you ask a question, share a scoop, or offer a cryptic title that peeks your reader's curiosity. I'll often use a blog title that sounds like a scandal/scoop, but is really just a question. For example, "Microsoft Buying Yahoo?" I ran that headline last year–before Microsoft made its bid. It generated a lot of traffic then and even more so now.
Keep it short and sweet – if you make your initial post title too long, you run the risk that you'll either confuse a reader or give them so much information, tthere's no need to read the post itself. Back to my example, "Microsoft Buying Yahoo?" leaves a lot of unanswered questions that just beg the reader to click through to view the entire post. If I had used "Rumors that Microsoft May Buy Yahoo, but No Confirmation Yet," how many of you would have clicked through to read the entire post? Not many.
Appeal to keyword scanners – When you read posts in your RSS reader, do you sometimes scan the titles looking for keywords that you know will interest you? Apple, Google, Wii, and Blue-Ray are all examples of keywords that might appeal to your specific audience. This is not the same as keywords for SEO–that comes later–at this stage, you're simply looking to include words that will make your post stand out to your readers. Use popular keywords in your post titles and your post will have a greater chance of standing out among all of the other posts in your reader's RSS aggregator.

In stage one, your goal is to appeal to the initial readers that will likely view the post on the day that you publish it. But what happens after your post is relegated to the archives? It's unlikely someone will spend hours just wondering through your archived posts. Instead, they'll likely discover your "great content" via one of the search engines. OK, only one search engine: Google.

With this in mind, you need to massage your post's title so that it can go to work for you in Google's search results.

Stage Two – Your Google readers

That cryptic, enticing post title you used to attract your initial readers isn't going to cut-it when it comes to attracting Google search engine users. Sure, you want your post title to entice a click from the SERP (search engine results page) but if your post is sitting on page 10–and not page 1–it doesn't matter how engaging your post title. In stage two, you need to give your post title the Google-juice it needs to make the first SERP.

Add keywords to your title – you should have already included a relevant keyword that appeals to the human "keyword scanners." Now that it's Googleblot scanning your post title, it's time to pump-up your keyword count. Now, don't go overboard and add half a dozen keywords to your post titles–you want the title to remain targeted and enticing–but you should look for opportunities to include additional keywords. Compare this before, and after post title. Before: "Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Management Nightmare." After: "Ten Ways to Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results." Both are engaging, both convey the same meaning. Yet, the revised title removes keywords that are not likely to be Googled such as "avoid" and "nightmare," while adding keywords that are searched often, such as "fix" and "remove negative results."
Change the word order – I always try to take into consideration my potential Google ranking, when writing my post titles. However, there are many times when I see my post sitting at #11 on Google, because the word order I used–while appealing to my initial audience–isn't doing me any favors in the SERPs. So, like a good optimizer, I go back and change the word order so that the beneficial keywords are closer to the beginning of the title (which is where Google prefers to see them). Here's a before: "26 Free Tools for Buzz Monitoring." And after: "Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools." (Notice I also added the keyword "buzz tracking" to the title).
Optimize your TITLE – When you first publish your blog posts, you'll likely want your TITLE (aka title tag) to match your actual post title. Once you start focusing on your Google audience, it might make sense to tweak your page TITLE so that it's even more optimized than your post title (side note: most blog software will simply match your page TITLE to your post title). If you're using WordPress, consider installing the SEO Title Tag plugin to do just that! I don't use it on Marketing Pilgrim, but on other blogs, I've found it a great way to further optimize y TITLE–which is what is displayed in Google's SERP.
Don't play with slugs – I'll write more on the topic of page "slugs" (aka permalinks) but I'd be negligent if I didn't warn here that, while you should change your post title, changing the actual page slug is to be avoided.

I hope you'll find the above tactics to be fruitful in your quest to increase both initial, and Google-referred, visitors to your blog. I've got plenty more tips I can share, so let me know what you think and if you'd like to read more blog promotion tips.

Title Tags

You may not know what a title tag is, but you have seen it. Every time you perform a Google search, websites with relevant title tags usually so up towards the top of the page. For example,

Take a look at your blog's source code, the title tag will be close to the top and it will look something like this: <title>Quick Sprout - I'm Kind of a Big Deal</title>. Ideally your title tags should be descriptive, short, unique, and somewhat keyword rich. With a blog though, the title tag of each page is the title of your blog post, but this doesn't mean you can't optimize it.

WordPress
If you have a WordPress blog go into your header file and replace your title tag code with this:

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name'); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title(",true); } ?></title>

Movable Type
If you have a Movable Type blog, replace your title tag code with this:

<title><$MTEntryTitle$></title>

Meta Description

Each meta description tag on your blog should be unique, short, and descriptive.

Writing a unique meta description for each of your blog posts can be time consuming, which is why I recommend making the first sentence of each of your blog posts your meta description.

WordPress
The Head Meta Description plugin automatically adds a unique meta description tag to each of your blog posts. Just download it, upload it to your server, active it, and set it to 25 words.

Movable Type
I don't know of any plugins that do the same on Movable Type, but through your post template code you can do the same thing. Just add this line of code:

<meta name="description" content="<$MTEntryBody words="25″$> …" />

Sitemaps

You could create an HTML sitemap on your blog to increase the number of pages search engines index, or you could create an XML sitemap. I personally recommend going the route of creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to the search engines.

After you create your XML sitemap you can submit it to Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Live Search.

301 Redirect

Some people have a tendency to link to http://yourdomain.com and others tend to link to http://www.youdomain.com. Both of those URLs may look the same, but one contains a www and the other doesn't. So if 100 websites link to the non-www version and 1000 websites links to the www version, search engines may see both of those URLs as separate pages even though they are the same site.

You can solve this by adding a 301 redirect in your htaccess file.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^YOURDOMAIN.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Another way you can solve this is through Google Webmaster Central. In Webmaster Central (under the settings tab) you can tell Google to pick the www or non-www version of your domain. Although this is an easier solution than modifying your htaccess file, you should still do both because Google Webmaster Central doesn't affect how other search engines see your blog.

Duplicate Content

If the same piece of content is on more than 1 page of your blog, you will have duplicate content issues. The more duplicate content you have on your blog, the less search engine traffic you will get. In most cases the same piece of content will be on your home page, the post page, and in your category achieves. Here is how you can get rid of your duplicate content:

PageRank Sculpting

If you have the Google Toolbar installed on your computer, you probably know what PageRank is. If you don't, it is a numerical value from 1 to 10 that websites get. 1 means that a website isn't that important and 10 means that a website is very important.

A good way to increase your Google PageRank is to control your links. If you have too many links on a web page, that page's PageRank can decrease. Now this doesn't mean having ten or twenty links on a page is going to hurt you, or that you shouldn't link to other sites. In other words, you should not link out to 1000 other pages when it doesn't provide any value to a user. A good way to solve this problem is to "nofollow" links.

Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence a web pages ranking. The code you can use to nofollow certain link is:

rel="nofollow"

The links I recommend nofollowing on your blog are things like contact pages, terms of service, comment links, privacy policy, and read more links. You can pretty much nofollow the second instance of any duplicate link on a given page.

Image Search

People don't just search for web pages, they also search for images. Search engines aren't smart enough to decrypt an image and tell you what it is, like humans can. But through code you can help a search engine figure out what keywords your images are related too.

You can optimize your images through 5 easy steps:

1.      Enable image Labeler in Google Webmaster Central. (you can find it under the settings tab)

2.      Give meaningful names to your images. For example, GreenToyotaCamry.jpg is better than image1.jpg.

3.      Add long description tags to your images. For example: longdesc="1998 green Toyota Camry driving down the highway".

4.      In addition to a long description, an alt tag should be used as a short description. For example: alt="Toyota Camry"

5.      Lastly, you want to upload big images. Bigger images usually have a higher priority than smaller images.

Conclusion

After you do all of these changes, your search engine traffic should increase. Just be patient because it could take a few weeks before you start seeing any increases in traffic. If you have a brand new blog, don't expect to get much search engine traffic. It can take months before you start g

Please do not print this email unless it is absolutely necessary.

The information contained in this electronic message and any attachments to this message are intended for the exclusive use of the addressee(s) and may contain proprietary, confidential or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately and destroy all copies of this message and any attachments.

WARNING: Computer viruses can be transmitted via email. The recipient should check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses. The company accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this email.

www.wipro.com