Archive for the 'Search Engine Optimization' Category

I’m one of those types that takes little blurbs from the “SEO Masters” of the blogosphere and tries to apply a little here and a little there. I think mostly it’s cause I don’t have the time to learn it all at once and then implement a great SEO plan. If you’re reading this blog regularly, you probably don’t have time to do that either.

However, you really should take the time to learn 5-10 good SEO techniques and then apply them to your blog or all the blogs you try and setup. Taking the time to do this will utilize your time better because you won’t be wasting your time building links, or adjusting you tags, or writing content, in ways that won’t help you in the long run

The best resource I’ve found and I found it over at Digital Point Forums is an eBook by Brad Callen and he’s allowed it to be freely distributed. That’s why I say DP forums because it’s in about 10 posts over there.

I’ve uploaded the book to my servers and will allow you to read it or download it at SEO Made Easy PDF by Brad Callen.

Read it and develop a good plan. It will optimize the time you spend link building for sure.

I am now contradicting myself with directory submissions. I previously said that if you want to maximize your money and your time (and we all know time=money) you should look at paying someone to submit your blogs to directories.

Well that’s a great idea and can maximize your directory submission numbers very quickly and easily. However, you have to be careful with who you go with, how you submit, and how much you’re paying.

With people who run automated submission services, or semi-automated with the advent of captchas, you can’t be 100% certain that they are submitting the correct links and descriptions for your site. You also can’t be 100% certain that the links are even going to be approved. You may get the emails for submission, but if these services are blasting 200 directories with 200 sites each, some smaller directories may begin to block their IPs from acceptable submissions.

So what do you do know?

You start the submission process yourself. It’s a long process, but this way you have complete control over what you submit and when you submit it. You’ll also know exactly what you submitted and when you submitted it so you can contact the directory administrators to find out when your links are going to be added, or why they weren’t.

While doing mass submissions to web directories you need to streamline your process so that you can be very very efficient. You need to know that your links are going to be accepted or have a very good chance of being accepted and you need submit your blogs efficiently.

First thing, finding web directories that will almost guarantee acceptance and quick acceptance, isn’t as hard as it seems. If you head over to the Digital Point Forums section Directories – Solicitations and Announcements you’ll find lots of people trying to either start their directories or build their web directory listings. Just about 5-10 directories that say they’re offering free submissions and open them in a few tabs.

Next you’ll to make a word file with the following information:

• Site Title
• Link URL
• Site Description

Make this for as many sites as you have. Now open the submit pages on each of the web directories. (I suggest the directories that offer the choice of categories on the submit page, it’s quicker) Next copy and paste the all the information into the site description section of the submit for for every directory you have open. Then cut the link from the description box, and paste it into the URL box. Then finally cut the site title from the description box and paste it into the site title box.

Choose your category. Hopefully your left the option to allow your browser to remember what you’ve filled into boxes before and you can just click on the Name and Email boxes to fill those in. Fill out the captcha and done.

This is really helpful when you have multiple sites to submit. I have 16 sites I’m submitting to directories, so I do one site at a time and submit that one site to each directory. That way I don’t have to go back to my word file and copy and past all the time.

If you do 5 of these each day, it should take you only 30 minutes to an hour to do and you’ll have 100 directory submissions by months end.

What is that SEO mean anyway? It means Search Engine Optimization and its all the rage.

See, each search engine compiles it’s search results differently using algorithms, wizards, and little gnomes to rank pages all across the internet. Knowing how they do it and then tailoring your pages to their algorithms and gnomes liking is one of the biggest battles a webmaster can go through. Staying up to date it seems like is a full-time job and there are even blogs, lots of them, devoted to following Search Engine Optimization, for all the different search engines.

Really there are three search engines where if you follow your stats you can see that the bulk of your traffic comes from, or at least your search traffic anyhow. Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Each of them have slightly different ways of “indexing” your blog. Indexing is essentially putting all of your web pages into their system so people can search your content. Once they finally index your pages, they rank them for different keywords and keyword combinations.

Your job as a part-time blogger is to follow how they rank your pages and optimize your blog for that. As a part-time blogger that’s a tough thing to keep up with day to day. Like we said, it’s a full-time bloggers job, many of them.

We’ll be giving you tips here and there but the biggest thing you can do is get links and stick to keywords. Following those tips will help you optimize without knowing you’re doing it.

SEO can be a full-time job and following the world of Search Engine algorithms can keep your head spinning. We’ve compiled a list below of some of the best SEO Blogs and Watch Groups out there so you can bookmark one and let them do the work for you. You don’t want to waste your time as a part-time blogger figuring out what works best to get readers from search engines, you want to spend your time blogging and that’s it.

1. Problogger SEO Category
2. SEO Today
3. SEO Book
4. Yaro’s SEO Category
5. SEO MEMO

These are some good sites to keep you up-to-date with the SEO world and what works. If I had to choose one it would be Problogger SEO Category. It’s the best out there and will always be current. Keep that one on a must read. Feel free to add yours to the list via the comments. I’ll keep adding as you do.

Improving your ranking in search engines is one of the best ways to get your blog more traffic. That and of course writing quality content that is updated every day.

Focusing on title tags though we must first tell you what they are if you don’t know. Title tags are found in the section of every one of your pages. The head section is what helps the browser you or your readers are using know what’s going on in your page. You can put meta tags like keyword and description (which we’ll talk about soon), you also direct the browser to know where to find the stylesheet if there is any, and other java, and browser related goodies. Also here is the title tag .

If you look in the top left hand corner of your browser window you’ll see some description of what this web page is, Blog Tips for Part-Time Bloggers, and if you’re on just a single post you’ll see something like “Name of Post” >> Blog Tips for Part-Time Bloggers. Those titles are exactly what shows up in search results and what people see before clicking through to your page.

Now lets say everyone of my pages used the generic Wordpress title. My titles would go something like, “Archives – Date – Blogging On Empty.” What does that tell the user about your pages? Nothing. What does that tell search engine spiders and rankers about your pages? Nothing. Instead you should switch your title tags to promote your keyword heavy post titles that you should be using.

For this particular blog I use this little bit of php code to use what wordpress has stored in certain values, there’s a whole bunch of ways you can change the values around but the main ones you want to deal with from wordpress are as follows. Oh, and don’t worry, if you use other php based blogging platforms there is a good chance the use some sort of title function(described below) to display the title at the beginning of each post. You can use that to display the title as well as these other functions, with the browser:

bloginfo(‘description’) – this uses the description you enter in the general options section of your dashboard
wp_title() – this is the wordpress title you enter in the general options section of your dashboard
the_title() – this is the title give to each of your posts, this is the most important one.

Focus mainly, as I have been eluding to, on the the_title() function. This will allow the titles of your posts to be displayed as the title of your pages as read by the search engine spiders and your readers browser pane. If you use these php functions instead of hard coding everything then the title of each of your pages will change with the title of the post or page your reader is on and that the search engine spider sees.

For information on exactly what several people that I would call foremost authorities on the subject check out.

Wordpress and SEO at the undersigned
Make post titles page titles over at Problogger.
Keywords in URLS at Blog Herald.

These are just some of the resources out there but the main idea is to use the titles of our posts for the titles that are displayed in your readers browser and thus displayed as the titled for search engine results. Having good keywords is a major plus and having good titles exploits that.

Are you tired of digging through the endless SEO blogs and reading about everybody’s theory on what search engines are really looking for? Linking through the endless supply of SEO blogs can be daunting and it seems like everyone has their own theory. Use permalinks, don’t use permalinks. Comment more, comment less. Use a lot of keywords, keep your keywords down. What should you do.

Thomas over at The Undersigned has a great post about Wordpress and SEO where he neatly lists some of the top things you can do to get better search engine rankings.

Concise and to the point, no more digging through blogs like this one for SEO tips.