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Search Engine Optimization is one thing that makes many blogger’s heads spin – I know this because every time I write an seo article I purchase comments from bloggers telling me the reason is too big a topic and that they’d rather just write ‘quality content’.

Whilst I’ll never reason that quality content should be anything but a first priority in blogging, the reality is that there are many millions of pages of great writing languishing around in the bottom of search engines results pages that should be read by many but which rarely start to see the light of day his or her authors have failed to understand that merely a few simple tweaks in the writing process can see them ranking considerably higher.

So it’s time for another series – this time on Search Engine Optimization for Blogs!

People often ask me ‘how get ranked number one in (((insert favourite search results here)))?

My answer usually starts with – ‘I don’t really know what I’m talking about.but…’

You see whilst a few of my blogs rank very highly on different search engines – I often don’t define why. Much of what I do is educated guessing and experimentation. I do read a lot of other people’s information on the topic, but the more I read the more I realize that I’m one of many in my guess work – virtually any article I read is a ‘best guess’ of some sort.

My main advice to folks wanting to optimize their blogs for search engines like google is to keep it simple. Start with quality content on a specific topic and then tweak it while using the best current advice making the rounds.

When I think about SEO for my blogs I tend to divide the things I focus upon into two parts – offsite and onsite search engine optimization techniques. Offsite techniques are more about what others do on their own websites in linking to you, onsite techniques you have more control over as you write.

Off-site SEO Techniques

Off-site SEO Techniques are as the name suggests factors from outside the site itself (ie from other sites) that impact the blog’s ranking in search engines. Many of these factors are beyond your blogger’s control – however they are helpful to know. The most obvious and probably most powerful offsite factor are Inbound Links (something I’ve already referred to above).

It can be generally agreed that the links that refer to a website are one of the most powerful method of climbing Search Engines results pages (actually many argue it is THE most important factor). – To put it most simply – every hyperlink to your site is seen by the engines like google as being a vote of confidence with your site.

Ideally Speaking – The most effective inbound links have three main qualities for them:

they are from higher ranked sites than your own

they are relevant to the topic you are covering

they link to you using relevant keywords in your page

Whilst you may not have complete control over who links to you development of the child types of links that you should be dreaming of.

How to generate quality one way links?

Of course whilst most of us know this it doesn’t make getting such links any easier – its at the disposal of others in many cases. So how do you get such links?

Quality Content – You’ll find all kinds of link generating systems on the market but in my opinion the best way to get links for a blog is to write quality content that folks will want to read. You can solicit links with others or sign up for different linking programs or even buy text links on other sites however the cheapest and probably safest approach is to build inbound links in a natural organic way as others hyperlink to your quality content.

Notify Relevant Bloggers of one’s content – Whilst I don’t advocate spamming other bloggers and asking for links – I would recommend if you write a quality post over a topic that you know will interest another blogger who’s might be worth shooting them a short and polite email letting them know your post. Don’t be offended whenever they don’t link up, but you might just realize that they do and that in addition to the direct traffic the link generates that it helps build your own page rank in the search engines (more on letting other bloggers are conscious of your posts here).

Directories – A different way to generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. I know of webmasters who recommend the benefits of such a strategy – the first thing that they do when starting a brand new site is to do the rounds of directories – submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords inside links. There are loads of directories out there – many of which offer a no cost submission. Ari Paparo has compiled a directory of blog directories that you might choose to start with.

Inter-link your Blogs – Increasingly bloggers are starting or joining blog networks to enjoy the benefits of multiple sites and writers working together. A benefit of networks of sites is they usually link to one another. In doing so you have complete control over how your sites are associated with from multiple domains. It’s worth noting that you ought to be careful with this approach – if your entire sites are hosted for the one server many believe Search Engines will work out what you’re doing and also the impact will be lessened.

Buy Links – Many professional web masters have a budget to purchase links using their company highly ranked and and relevant sites. I won’t enter this too much here but you might want to read more about it in my recent post On Buying Text Links.

update: I’d encourage anyone wanting to buy links to think cautiously about this. Google have been cracking down on sites that use this practice. They can’t catch everyone but some have been caught and appear to have been penalized for doing it.

Swap Links – Similarly many bloggers swap links to bloggers. Sometimes this happens pretty naturally (you see someone linking to you so you link back) in many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between site owners. I get daily requests for such reciprocal links (I rarely act on them). Whilst there is some benefit in such link swapping I would again advise caution here as many SEO experts believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing site. Some try to get around this by doing indirect or triangulated links. ie as opposed to site An and B doing a principal swap they involve other sites. So A links to C in return for D (also owned by C) linking to B (also owned by the) – makes your head hurt doesn’t it!?! Additionally, there are a variety of systems around that say they’ll manage such interlinking for you – I know many who use Digital Point’s Free CO-Op Advertising system. Personally I tend to avoid such schemes where you can policy of linking to sites I believe are valuable to my readers. Whenever they link back then so whether it be.

If you’re looking for link exchange/buying/selling programs you might prefer to look at systems like:

– Link Adage
– Text Link Ads
– Link Worth

On Site SEO Techniques

Having viewed Off site Search Engine Optimization Techniques I’ll now turn my attention to examining some of the factors you might like to keep in mind as you build your blog – (or Onsite techniques – things you do in your blog that help build a higher ranking). As with all SEO Techniques there are many of these and a lot of speculation around all of them so let me touch on as many as I can:

1. Keyword Rich Content – identify a number of keywords for your article that you’re hoping are certain to get indexed highly by Google. Don’t pick too many but consider the questions

Just how do i want people to find this post looking Engines?

What will they type into Google if they want information on the topic you’re writing?

How can I find information on this topic in the Search Engines?

What results come up while i do plug these keywords into Google?

Any alternative keywords are other sites using?

The solution to these questions will give you a hint as to what words you’ll want to see repeated throughout your article a number of times.

These keywords should be the most common words used in your article. Use them in some or all of the following ways:

Keywords in post and page titles )

Keywords in address of page

Keywords in outbound links

Keywords in bold tags (try do it at least once)

Keywords in heading tags (there is certainly debate over exactly how to use them but it’s generally accepted that H1 tags are very important and that h2, h3, h4 etc tags likewise have an impact. Having said that I’ve seen some pages rank adequately in search engines without using heading tags. There are several tutorials online about heading tags)

Keywords in image alt tags

Keywords in the general throughout the text of the post – but especially early, in the first few sentences

Keywords in meta tags (they seem to be less valuable currently but many still believe they are useful with some search engines

Of course you can go do too much with keywords in posts and allow it to destroy your content – in case it fits with what you’ve written tweak it to include the words you are targeting a couple of extra times. Most SEO experts recommend getting the keyword density up to between 5-20% – I do think 20% is probably bordering on massacring your posts.

One last word of warning and disclaimer on keyword rich content – don’t sacrifice readers experience of your site just for the sake of SEO. Yes keyword density can be important in climbing the search engine rankings – but more essential is that your content and design are easy to use and helpful to readers. There’s nothing worse than a site that’s stuffed with keywords – these sites come off as cheap, nasty and spammy – don’t fall for the temptation.

2. Themed sites – One of the growing theories of SEO is you are more likely to rank well if you have a substantial amount of pages over a similar theme. ie a market topic blog will probably achieve greater rankings than a general one that covers many topics. Build a blog with over 200 pages of content on the same theme and you’ll increase your likelihood of ranking well as SEs will see you as an authority on the topic. The take home advice here is to keep to many kind of a topic/niche/theme for your blog. It is usually probably another argument for categories and tagging posts that relate together strongly.

3. Site Design – Search Engines like well laid out, well coded and easy to navigate sites. Make sure your pages validate (I need to work more on this) and that they are viewable on all major browsers. Search Engines don’t tend to like too much Flash, Frames or Java Script within your site – keep it simple and clean and their robots will index your site a lot faster and more accurately. Likewise try to keep your blog free from dead links (difficult for those of us with older blogs with big archives).

4. Interlink your Site – The way Search Engines index your site is to send little robot crawlers to your site to track what you’ve written and continue with the links. Make it easier to allow them to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely. Most SEO experts advise that you provide some sort of Site Map meaning every page on your blog is simply a link or two faraway from every other one. One way to do this for bloggers is to make certain that your category pages are in your sidebars as I do on this blog. Also make sure every page links back to your main page and every other important pages on your site. If you’re writing on a topic you’ve previously written about consider linking from what you’ve written before or make use of a ‘other relevant posts’ feature at the base of your respective article. You’ll see in my menus towards the top of the page a number of my key categories and articles. One of several impacts of having them highlighted this way is that they have become some of the most highly ranked pages on ProBlogger given that they are linked to from every page on this blog.

5. Update regularly – The more you update your blog the more often Search engines like google will send their crawlers for a site to index it. This may mean your new articles could seem in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. This is a natural benefit of blogging – maximize it!

6. Outbound Links – There is certainly debate over how SEs treat outbound links out of your blog. I’m in the camp who feel that relevant outbound links improve your site’s ranking in search engines. It’s my job to link out to quality relevant sites i think my readers will discover useful and have a little anecdotal evidence that generally seems to support the theory that this has good health for the way SEs index you (have a look at Waynes article on the topic for more info). Linking to sites outside your own personal blog does mean you end up sending traffic away from your blog so you need to count the cost of such a strategy. Note that you must always try to link to reputable and relevant sites for an own page. Also keep in mind that too many outbound could have detrimental impact upon your blog. Like in most things in SEO – moderation is paramount.

7. Choose your website wisely – there are numerous factors to make note of when selecting a domain name. For one you might prefer to include your keyword in it whenever possible. Secondly you should do a little research to see if someone else has previously used the domain. This could have both bad and the good impact. If it was a quality site with backlinks you might reap some benefits but when it was a banned spam site you could always be banned from Google for a long period. One service you might want to use to check on expired domains is Made use of Machine at Archive.org.

8. Register your Domain to get a Lengthy Period – a current patent by Google shows that it now looks at the length of your domain’s registration in ranking it. It does this because many spam sites have short registrations plus a longer one indicates that you’re constructing a site with substance and are in it for the long haul.

9. One topic per post – the harder tightly focused the theme of an page the better when Engines like google come to rank it. Sometimes you might find yourself writing long posts that wind up covering a number of different topics. Some may relate loosely but if search engine results positioning is what you’re after it could be safer to break up your post into smaller focused pieces.

10. Write optimal length posts – there exists some thought going around the Search Engine Optimization community that pages which might be too short can get passed over for higher rankings. I try to keep posts at the least 250 words. Of course there are many posts on my blogs which might be shorter, but if I’m writing a post that I want to rank well I attempt to give it some meatiness in terms of length. Alternatively don’t make it too long either – because in the process you make it difficult to keep your keyword density up and can end up with a less tightly focused page. Research also shows that longer articles can have a pretty steep disappear rate in readers following the text gets below the ‘fold’ as well as to the end of the first screen of article .

11. Avoid Duplicate content – Google warns publishers in its guidelines about having the same content on multiple pages. It goes for both multiple pages that you own and also pages that others own. This is because a tactic of spammers is usually to reproduce content on many pages and/or to steel content from other sites. There is some debate over what duplicate content does and doesn’t include (as an example many bloggers use ‘free articles’ as content on their own blogs – these articles often be visible on hundreds and even thousands of other sites online and to me could be known as duplicate content) – make an effort to to be very careful about how a multitude of locations your content appears. I do republish occasional posts (or elements of them) but try not to make this happen too much and attempt to add elements which are unique on each occasion how the posts are republished).

12. Ping – services like Pingomatic (you’ll find so many others too) will ping many different websites for you to notify them that you’ve updated. In this you’ll also be letting search engines realize that you’ve updated which will trigger their robots into the future visit your blog. I’d also suggest pinging Google’s blog search tool.

13. Submit your RSS to MyYahoo – submitting your Feed to MyYahoo seems to help with getting indexed on Yahoo. Read more about this at Getting Yahoo Traffic to your Blog. Some also think that doing exactly the same thing to Google’s Personalised pages would have a similar impact.

14. Quantities of Content – I get into trouble when I talk about having lots of content – but I do think its true that bigger sites tend to rank better than smaller sites – whilst you are able to rank highly with a small site – it’s not likely the norm.. Search Engines will see your website as more comprehensive the more content you have. You also better your odds of being found in Search Engines if you have an overabundance of pages. By no means am I saying just to put up random junk content – be cautious about this – rather act on building a comprehensive and large site with time.

15. Submit to Search Engines – You are able to do all the best onsite SEO strategies on the planet and still get no where as the Search Engines have not found you first of all. Each search engine has a means of letting it know about your site – submit your URL being included in the index. Please note that takes time and perhaps a quicker plus much more effective way is to get linked to by the site already indexed by google. I’ve written a post about his previously at the way to get indexed by Google.

You might also like to tryout some of the services around that provide to submit your sites to search engines for you – I’d be skeptical of paying for this sort of service though. I do not have and seem to do ok.

Again Let me reinforce – the above techniques come out of my own experience and from the things I’ve learnt from others. I’m not an seo expert but find that if you maintain your above in mind you can do reasonably well. Don’t become obsessed by SEO – if you do you run the risk of forgetting about your reader, forgetting to write quality content and you could find yourself engaging in some dodgy SEO tactics that can get you banned from the Search Engines You’re trying to get listed in.

I’ll finish here with the addition of that SEO can take time – so show patience. After years of blogging I’ve managed to build my blogs page ranks and SERPs but it did not happen over night. It often seems that no matter what you do nothing works – it usually is that the words you’re wanting to target have been a heavily targeted segment in the internet (consider changing your approach) – or it could just be that there is some unknowable glitch with all the SE you are targeting – its a fickle game then one that I’d recommend you don’t rely on alone. So yes focus on your SEO but also take into account the many other methods around to discover readers for your blog.

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