Completed So Far:

My Blog is now live with a proper URL, I have planned what content I want to put on it over the next few months, and I am now at the point where I want to start developing the content.

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New Developments:

Before I could start working full-tilt on writing and preparing content, I needed to know a bit about Search Engine Optimization, and how to use SEO techniques to help draw visitors to this blog.

It is important to relax when you are learning new skills, particularly when they are as frustrating to learn as developing a blog

The reason to learn about and use search engine optimization is so that search engine spiders and bots can find, evaluate and rank your website or blog.

When someone does a online search, say on Google or Yahoo!, they usually end up with pages of results listing masses of websites, but only clicking on links to websites they find posted on the first 10 or so results pages. The more optimized your site is, the higher it will be ranked by search engines. This means that your site is more likely to end up on the first couple pages of the search engine’s results when someone searches on the keywords you have used to optimize your site with.

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Resources:

The resources I used for learning about Search Engine Optimization include:

• the SEO Copywriting Success program from the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), located at http://www.awaionline.com. This program’s format includes a set of DVD’s, a workbook and a textbook. The program goes into copywriting a little bit, but the bulk of the information is about SEO skills and techniques. The information is easy to understand and use – even for an absolute beginner.
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• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, by Darren Rowse & Chris Garrett. This book continues to amaze me with the amount of excellent information it provides.
• I also used the Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (3rd edition) book, written by Peter Kent, and have Google-searched for information I wasn’t sure of. Both of these resources are also excellent.

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Basically, there are four basic aspects to SEO-ing that bloggers should be aware of, and make good use of:

1. keywords and keyphrases
   • selecting keywords and keyphrases
   • using keywords and keyphrases
2. developing excellent content
   • useful and unique content
   • making your content scannable
3. links, links, and more links
   • internal links
   • outgoing links, and
   • incoming links
4. advanced keyword and keyphrase strategies
   • inserting keywords into meta-tags

Clicking on any of the highlighted sub-titles will take you directly to that post.

These four topics involve a lot of information, so to prevent you, dear readers, from getting a headache, I am going to further split these four topics into a couple of sections each, and post them individually on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays over the next couple of weeks.

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Next Step:

The first post in this series will be on Friday will focus on selecting the keywords and keyphrases that will start to bring traffic to your blog.

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