Free SEO Guide to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Traffic volume is the most important parameter when it comes to monetizing your blog (more visitors = more money). A large portion of traffic volume comes from search engines. To monetize efficiently, it's crucial to get your blog contents in the top list of any search engine result pages (SERP). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you to achieve this goal.

Photo by cambodia4kidsorg.

There are two types of search results:

• Natural (a.k.a organic).
• Paid (e.g. sponsored links in Google SERP).

We'll focus on improving your ranking for the natural search results. Getting in the first few pages of the SERP will ensure that most people will find your content.

Search engines basically need one thing to know where to put your blog on their list - your rank on the keyword(s) used to search. For example, if your blog title is Tiki Tiki Guide to Making Money, you might be ranked high if people search for the keywords 'tiki tiki guide'. But you might be far beneath the thousands of other pages on the keywords 'making money online'. The question is, which of these two keyword phrases people will most likely search for. The answer is obvious.

The key to performing SEO lies in knowing what keywords to use and how to optimize their use. Be warned that heavily searched keywords are usually targeted by millions of sites and blogs, whom you have to compete against to move up the SERP. Finding a balance between highly competitive and highly searched keywords is a challenge.

Keyword and SEO research takes time. Even professional bloggers take a few months to move up the SERP right into the first few pages. Above all, content is the heart of a blog. If the content isn't good, no SEO research will do you any good.

Target the Right Keywords
Deciding what to blog is the most critical part. You must do research on keywords prior to deciding your niche. Here are some list of what to check on:

• Search volumes on those keywords.
• Number of competitors writing in the same niche.
• Ads served based on those keywords, so that you don't blog on the ones serving very low cost-per-click(CPC).
• Variations of these keywords: their synonyms and related words or phrases (see which get searched more with less competitor).

The best tool to help you with this is Wordtracker, available at a price. The site offers free trial and limited functions available for free. There are other keyword tools available with different functionalities.

Choose Suitable Domain Name
SEO keywords begin from the URL. The best domain name is the one with keyword(s) in it. It's great to have a URL like www.yourownname.com, but you'll loose out on getting better SERP rank if it doesn't contain any keywords. Isn't it obvious that www.iwanttomakemoneyonline.com helps SEO better than www.johnjohnnyjonathan.com. Unless of course, you've built some high reputation and your name gets searched a lot.

The other perspective on domain naming is that building a brand name is better in the long run, with something easy and catchy to remember. So there's two side of the coin: you might want to flip on it. But once you've built your blog to a certain level, it's not good to change the domain name. Having a URL that's both catchy and keyword-friendly is ultimately the best. Problogger.net is both catchy and keyword-friendly. Use whois lookup to check if a domain is available.

Use Keywords in Other Sections
The idea is to maximize the use of keywords wherever you can (don't overdo it though). These are the places that you must put keywords in them:

• Blog Title - Search engines weigh your blog title heavily. Again, it's best to find a name that is both catchy and keyword-rich.
• Blog Description - This is where you want to write phrases that catches attention, but rich with keywords too. If you're ranked even at No.1, but your description is as dull as a bull, nobody is going to click to your blog.
• File Names - Use keywords to name files, pictures, photos, graphs, videos, etc that you're using in your blog.
• Internal Links - Some sites use image maps with hotspot hyperlinks, images, or buttons to navigate within the sites. This works against SEO. It's better to use text links instead of images as text links carry more weight when getting ranked in search engines.
• Tags or Labels - Each posts should be tagged or labelled with keywords to help strengthen SEO. Some prominent blog directories, like Technorati, uses these tags to identify your blog for others to search.

Blog titles, descriptions, and keywords can be enhanced by using META tags. Here's an article on how to use META tags efficiently.

Use Keywords Often in Content
How do search engine algorithms decide what each post is about? They'll scan for the the most-used keywords in the post, with different weights given to different elements. To make your posts 'acknowledged' as being related to any particular keywords, use and repeat them often in the posts. But don't do this too excessively to the point of being straight-out blunt and annoying. Having the right keyword-density in your posts have two benefits:

• Draws in more related ads to the post pages. Related ads have better click-through-rates (CTR).
  
• Contributes more towards getting higher rank on those keywords.

Build Links from External Sites
One way to get linked to is by exchanging links, commonly done in Blogrolls. Higher-ranking external sites helps your blog more in terms of SEO. Another way to do this is to submit your blog to directories (here's a tool for an automatic submission for multiple directories). Another highly trusted free directory is DMOZ. Posts can also be submitted to social media directories (e.g. Digg, StumbleUpon) that get voted up/down. Two benefits of submitting to directories:

• You're building links on external sites to your blog/posts.
• Others may stumble on your blog/posts in these directories and visit your blog from there.

Use Keywords to Anchor Hyperlinks
Don't use the term 'click here' to anchor hyperlinks - use keywords instead. Hyperlinks are valued more by ranking algorithms than the normal content text. Keyword anchors contribute better to SEO compared to the clickhere anchors.

Create Efficient Site Navigation Map
How to influence your readers to stay longer in your blog? Make it easy for them to see what's in your blog. To do this is to build efficient site map, something like an Archives or Categories lists. Even better is to list Related Posts items at the end of each post. Use keywords to anchor all links. This practice helps SEO as it build links to your own blog using keywords, albeit internally, and helps spiders to crawl up your pages easily.

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This article has been adapted from an article by Randy DuerMyer at About.com (Alexa rank: 144). The main key points was summarized to shorten the text and expanded to include new and valuable information not available in the original article. The new article (1134 words) is much shorter by 40% compared to the original article (1880 words).

SEO-Related Mistakes You Must Avoid

Terri Wells wrote in SEOCHAT.com mistakes related to SEO that should be avoided by webmasters. These mistakes could have bad results on your site’s position in search engines, traffic, and revenues which in the end badly hurts your strategy especially if your sites are intended as money generators. Some of the main ideas of her article are summarized here.

Keep Your Site Always Accessible
Taking your site down offline, due to maintenance for example, is bad for search engine optimization (SEO) as this will upset visitors especially regular readers. Even worst is if search engine robots crawl your site when it is down. Your site will be assumed to have expired and lost its position in search engine results pages (SERP).

To climb up the search engine rankings afterward when it’s up online would require full SEO effort again. It’s better for you to put up a mirror site when your original site needs to go offline.

If the site is a business portal and you’re not able to attend to it, say during vacation, it’s best to just let it up and running than to have it down. One advantage is that when it’s online your site has a chance to climb up the SERP. You can place a note saying that you’re not available during a certain time to avoid confusion or have forms for them to still place orders.

Spend Time and Money Wisely
There are tendencies for people who don’t know SEO to hire SEO companies to improve SERP positions drastically. Largely, these are spamming. Most of these companies will build large number of links to your sites. What people don’t know is that the links come from unrelated sites that aren’t counted as valuable to get your position up in SERP.

Search engines also have the ability to detect suspicious links, especially a large number of them and may penalize you for that. As a rule of thumb, good links take time and don’t come cheap.

Search engine crawlers eventually will index your new site, so it’s a waste of time to submit the URL yourself to search engines (although there are tips that say otherwise).

Submitting your URL to directories also have less effect on SERP nowadays compared to a few years ago because today’s search engines have more advanced and improved criteria indexing sites and blogs – most directories are now classified as link farms only, which is not seen as valuable links.Submitting to manually edited site like Wikipedia won’t do any good because they are set with a “nofollow” property, meaning that crawlers do not follow outbound links.

Compromising Content is a Bad Thing
The strategy of splitting content in subdomains to gain more spots in SERP is not a good one. It risks visitors’ experience as the contents are divided in different subdomains or even domains making it harder to find. In the long term, your readers’ bad experience dominates and affects your site negatively in terms of traffic and in the end conversions to revenues.

There are reports mentioning that some sites aren’t crawlable and thus won’t lend them positions in SERP. Some of the main causes are:

• Incorrect robots.txt files.
• Need Session IDs.
• URLs have too many variables.
• Complex navigation menu.
• Too much use of AJAX, Flash, or graphics.

The good trend is to make it as simple as possible.

Although one should focus on SEO to get noticed, compromising content is not the way to go. Many have made this mistake. In a bigger picture, the main purpose people search the internet is to find good content; tricking them into sites without real and valuable content won’t last long.

Don't Abuse Keywords
Today’s search engines are advanced enough to have the ability to detect keyword abuse as spamming. And, they’re advanced enough to penalize those sites that do this. Types of keyword abuse include:

• Stuffing content too much with keywords.
• Stuffing meta tags, titles, and headers with keywords.
• Having the same meta tags on every page (identified by robots as duplicating contents).
• Tricking readers with hidden keywords (keywords with background color to make them invisible).

Good Practices
Targeting general keywords will make it nearly impossible to rank in SERP. Instead, try targeting longer and specific keywords such as “making money with blogs” rather than just “money” with too much competition from more established websites. New sites will have more chances of crawling up the SERP using more specific keywords, and results into better conversion if your main goal is to make money.

Focusing too much on building the perfect keyword density is not a good idea too because this makes your writing flows unnaturally, too repetitive with the same keywords, and boring to the readers. Write naturally and let those keywords fall into place. Forcing it only makes your content unreal and annoying to read.

Update: This following article gives compact SEO tips to improve your search engine ranking.

Photo by *L*u*z*a*.

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This post is a summary of an original post by Terri Wells at SEOCHAT.com (Alexa rank: 2740). The original length of 1848 words has been cut down to 806 words (56% less).

How to add META tags into your blog?

Do you want to improve your blog value, get more hits, and ranked high on search engines? Then you must optimize how your blog is indexed in a search engine.

While there are lots of factors involved in building quality blogs that can draw huge traffic in, having simple things right in the beginning is as important. One of this simple thing is getting your blog indexed properly with the right description & keywords to optimize search engine rankings (known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO).

To get information, search engines use automated software agents called spiders, crawlers, robots, or bots to collect the a few words from a site or blog (typically the URLs, blog name, and blog description, and maybe some words in the early part of sentences or paragraphs) that will later be used as keywords to index the blog.

Because you cannot be certain which words are taken as keywords pertaining to your blog, it's most likely that your blog won't be indexed properly in search engines - in the worst case, your highly relevant keywords might not even be used to index your blog. When this happen, searches on keywords relevant to your blog may have your blog buried at the far end of the list of thousands and millions of pages. What a waste!

To have a control of what is read by crawlers on your blog to be indexed, you have to build what is called a META tag - basically a bunch of words that makes up the most relevant description and keywords of your blog. If the META tag exist, this is what the crawlers will read and index and get displayed on any searches related to your keywords.

Here's what a search on my blog looks like on Google. The description is exactly the one I have written in the META tag. The 1st search on the list shows the new META tag description that was made a few seconds before the snap. The old META tag is shown beneath it (22 hours ago).


There are basically 2 parts to a META tag: first is the META description and second is the META keywords. The description are what appears on a search. As you can see, if the description is too long, it'll be cropped as search engines only uses a few lines to describe the blog. An optimum number of characters to use for META description is 150 (including spaces and dots).

For META keywords, you can use as many words as you want, but don't repeat the same word too many times (more than 5) to avoid keyword spam. Crawlers can identify keyword spamming easily - which won't make it good either for SEO.

To create a META tag, simply copy the code below and rewrite your META description and keywords (the red text):

<meta content='text/html; charset=utf-8' http-equiv='Content-Type'/>
<meta content='Write your META description here. Keep it less than 150 characters.' name='description'/>
<meta content='Write your META keywords here as many as you want separated with commas. Keep word repetition less than 5 to avoid keyword spamming.' name='keywords'/>

Then, place it in between the <head> ..... </head> section near the top part of your template XML code. It's best to put it just below the <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> code.

For more details:
Go to this Free META Tag Builder tool. It directs you easily to build a META tag, create the HTML or XHTML code, and guides to paste it into your blog template XML code.

Just for the fun of it, you can analyze your blog's original description and keywords by submitting your blog URL at the Free META TAG Analyzer before placing the new META tags in your blog - so that you can compare how it is indexed before and after the change.