Advice for new bloggers: The basics of search engine optimization (SEO)

May 18, 2009 by bananas

As part three of my Essential Advice for New Bloggers series we’re talking about establishing a readership.

Last week we talked about networking, and today I’ll cover basic search engine optimization (often referred to as SEO). Stay tuned for next week, when I show you how to convert one-time visitors to repeat readers.

Search engines are in the position to send you a whole lot of traffic. But it takes a basic understanding of how they work and the implementation of a few basic strategies to take advantage of this gold mine.

How search engines work (the short version)
The truth is, the exact innermost workings of any given search engine is a highly secret, patented, and protected affair. I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. (Also, I don’t really know). That’s ok, because most of us don’t really care about the details anyhow. We just want to skip ahead to the part where you find out HOW TO GET MORE TRAFFIC. Am I right? So here goes.

Generally, search engines rank website content based on the following criteria: Keywords and Rank. I’ll give you a brief and highly generalized overview of each, along with some related suggestions for how to optimize your blog for higher search ranking. This is a subject worthy of many, many articles, books, and debates so I won’t even pretend to cover it all. Consider this a starting point on your quest for true SEO.

Keywords. The words that you use to name and describe your blog, the words you use in your post titles and categories, and the words that exist within the body of your posts all influence whether your blog will be returned for any given search.

Say, for example, you have a blog called “Fluffy Bunny Wuvers: A blog for people who wuv fluffy bunnies,” which you host at www.fluffybunnywuvers.com. Odds are good that if someone searches for “fluffy bunny wuvers” your blog will appear early in search results. If someone were to search for “I rather enjoy soft rabbits,” on the other hand, your blog might not fare so well.

Choosing the right keywords is an art, a science, maybe even a miracle (or so it sometimes seems).

The good news is, the goal of any good search engine is to put the most relevant links at the top of the search results. So, if you are writing relevant content and using common words to talk about it, the magic of google or yahoo will do the rest.

Tips for better keywording
Here are some basic tips for ensuring that your blog comes up in the right searches whenever possible.

1) Add a tagline to your blog’s title
Did you realize that your title and tagline are the most important descriptors for your blog? If your blog is titled “Fluffy Bunny Wuvers” it will almost always appear in search results BEFORE a blog that just mentions fluffy bunnies in one of its posts. This is a powerful thing.

“What’s a tagline?” you might be wondering, “and how do I get one?” Well, let me tell you. The tagline is the line of descriptive text that follows right after your title. And if you didn’t already guess, it’s really important.

My tagline at Absolutely Bananas is “Seattle mom blog.”

This tagline appears in the top line of a reader’s browser window just after the title, and also appears in the blog name when the website is bookmarked or otherwise referenced. The tagline doesn’t have to appear ON your blog (unless you want it to)… mainly it’s useful for telling search engines what your website is about.

So here’s how it works. Without a tagline, my blog is primarily going to come up in searches that include the word “absolutely” or “bananas”… which isn’t likely to get me a lot of relevant content since my blog has nothing to do with the smooshy yellow fruit.

With the tagline, though, if a searcher searches on any of keywords in my tagline (or any combination of them), my site is likely to come up. They could search for “Seattle mom,” “Blog Mom Seattle,” “Mom blog,” or any other combination of these words and Absolutely Bananas would appear in the results.

Pretty simple, right? Are you starting to feel the power of the tagline?

Let’s do another fun example by applying this strategy to our Fluffy Bunny Wuvers site. First we’ll brainstorm words that searchers are likely to use when looking for our site. Let’s say we come up with: resource, guide, rabbit, hare, friend, fan, devotee.

So now we just have to put the words together into a cohesive description. Like this:

A resource guide for rabbit and hare friends, fans, and devotees.

Our new title and tagline combination becomes:

Fluffy Bunny Wuvers: A resource guide for rabbit and hare friends, fans, and devotees

Thanks to our crafty genius, if someone searches “rabbit friend,” “fan of rabbits,” “bunny devotee,” “rabbit guide,” or any of the other possible word combinations, the Fluffy Bunny Wuvers website will come up. Success!

2) Optimize your post titles
Now let’s move on to how you can optimize individual posts. Basically, you’ll want to apply similar logic to that we just discussed when writing titles for your posts.

When titling a post, think of the best descriptive words that you can use to describe your topic. Put yourself in the position of a reader who is looking for a post exactly like the one that you’ve written. How would you, as the reader, search? What words would you use? Now make sure you’ve put those words into your post title and voila! it’s optimized.

For example, let’s say you’ve written a post about the challenges of being a stay-at-home mom. Although it’s rather dull, the title “Challenges of being a stay-at-home mom” will probably perform pretty well in search results. Although it’s tempting, the catchier title, “Splat! There goes my coffee” won’t do so well (except on searches for splat and coffee, which I’m guessing is a readership you’re not looking to capture.)

If you MUST be clever you can always combine the two, to make “Splat! There goes my coffee: Challenges of being a stay-at-home mom.”

3) Put the keywords (and their synonyms) in the body of the post.
Hopefully by now you can see where I’m going. You want to make sure that the commonly used keywords, which are likely to be searched on, are appearing in your post. It’s also a good idea to include synonyms in case someone searches on a variation.

Ranking
Search engines have a scientific, magical, super-duper-secret formula for figuring out which websites are most important. Google calls this PageRank, and assigns each site a PageRank number between 0 and 10 (10 being the gold standard to which everyone aspires).

No one knows exactly how Google figures out this ranking (especially since, every time we think we have it figured out, they CHANGE IT). But we do know that having other sites link to yours is really, really important.

From Google’s How to Create a Google-friendly site;

Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Let me translate that into non-nerd speak.

Google bases PageRank on popularity. If you have a lot of other sites that link to you, you must be popular, and therefore you get a higher PageRank. If the sites that link to your are popular themselves (i.e. have a high PageRank), your PageRank will go up even more.

You can see your current PageRank by going to: PRChecker.info

How to boost your PageRank?
This is one place where patience and consistently good blogging is really your best bet. There are a couple of tactics you can take to try and help it along, however.

1) Submit your blog to directories and listing sites. Some examples of these types of sites include:

MyBlogLog.com (great for building and finding community)
BlogCatalog.com
Blogged.com (ratings by editors)
BlogFlux.com
Alltop.com
Allmediocre.com

2) Participate in carnivals, awards, and memes. (see my post on networking for more tips on how to best use these forums)

3) Post good content that other bloggers will want to link to.

4) Link generously. I really do believe in the karma of blogging. Be generous and your generosity will be returned to you.

There’s no good way to trick the system, and asking other (important) websites to link to you will often get you ignored. Don’t be tempted to get involved in some PageRank promoting scheme, since Google has a list of these behaviors that they really, really don’t like.

Now go forth and be optimized!

Advice for new bloggers: The basics of search engine optimization (SEO)

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