UPDATE: Here’s tonight’s #Blogchat transcript! (Click ‘Transcript’ on the left to view).
Well this is a topic I can definitely blog about, since I am no SEO expert! We will also be discussing this topic tonight (Sunday, July 21st 2013) at #Blogchat on Twitter.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Effectively, what you are doing is ‘helping’ search engines understand what topics you are writing about.
A great way to do this is to use keywords and phrases that tie back to your topic, in your blog post itself. For example, notice that the phrase ‘Blogging SEO’ appears in this post’s title, as well as throughout the post itself. By placing this phrase in the title and in the post itself, I am helping Google and other search engines to recognize what this post is about.
So when someone searches for a term related to blogging SEO, or blogs and SEO, this post will likely do better in search results as a result of me using those specific words. This is why you’ll see bloggers often write their blog post titles in the form of a question. Such as ‘So what’s the best way to use Twitter?’ Because if someone does a Google search for the term ‘What’s the best way to use Twitter?’ that post will rank higher in search results for that exact term!
So if you are just getting started trying to optimize your blog posts for search, think about which keywords you are using with every post. And then focus on using those keywords in three locations:
1 – The post title. Notice that for this post ‘Blogging SEO’ is in the title. So if someone searches for ‘Blogging SEO’, that will help this post rank higher in the results.
2 – The post itself. I have repeated the term ‘Blogging SEO’ several times in this post. That further helps to impress on Google and other search engines that this post is about blogging SEO, and should be higher in the search results.
3 – The post’s URL. This is a tip that a lot of blogger’s miss. Notice that the URL for this post is https://mackcollier.com/blogging-seo The keywords ‘blogging SEO’ are literally part of the post’s URL! That also helps Google identify that this post is about Blogging SEO.
So those are some beginner tips for optimizing your blog content for search, and you’ll get a ton more tips tonight during #Blogchat, starting at 8pm Central time.
Finally, I know that #Blogchat has been hammered by a few spammers lately, so I have embedded the tweets here, and most of the spam tweets should be deleted from here. So if you want please follow along with #Blogchat here!
One thing to remember, your keywords need to be naturally incorporated. You can’t stuff a blog post with a specific keyword to rank higher. The keyword needs to make sense in context with your content. You not only are trying to get the search engines’ attention, but you need to make sure that your content is readable by human standards.
“you need to make sure that your content is readable by human standards.”
THAT needs to go on a t-shirt, great point Nick!
Can I get a hold of one of those T-Shirts lol
I find one of the things people miss when starting to look at this is making sure the page title and content title are different. Newbie’s won’t even realise they are separate things but they do have separate uses, as you know.
It was good info given on seo blog. This helps lot…
When searching on Google, people search by entering keywords related to the topic they are looking for. Google will then display a list of sites that contain these keywords. So before you start editing your SEO settings, make a list of words that best describe your business or site content – don’t include your site or business name in this list. Then open a Google Adwords Keyword Planner account to determine the most effective words for your site.