Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Introduction

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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