Archive for May, 2009

SEO for Blogs: Part Five – Off Site Optimization

Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 2:23 pm

This is the final part of my SEO for Blogs series and I am going to concentrate on the very important subject of Off Site Optimization. Off site optimization is all about building backlinks to your website and if you miss this part out you can probably wave goodbye to getting any traffic from the search engines!

Before we start I am assuming that you have already read part one, part two, part three and part four of my WordPress SEO series and you have chosen keywords for your home page, have a big list of keywords to use in your future blog posts and you have optimized your home page.

A backlink is simply a link from a website pointing to your website. Search engines see backlinks a bit like votes for a website – the more backlinks that you have the more important your website is deemed by the search engines. It’s not just the quantity of backlinks that counts though – it is also the quality. A backlink from an important website is better than a backlink from a brand new website. A backlink from a page that has just a few other links on it is better than a backlink from a page that has 50 other links on it.

In an ideal world, backlinks would come naturally. People would link to your website because the content on your site is useful to others. This happens a lot, but it can be difficult to get natural links to a new website that nobody knows about.

For this reason you need to spend a good proportion of your marketing efforts acquiring backlinks. There are lots of ways to do this and I discuss this in more detail in my how to improve your Google page rank post. In summary here are some of the things that you can do to get a backlink:

Write a short article of 400-500 words and submit it to article directories. Include an author resource box containing a link to your website.
Submit your website to online directories.
Leave a comment on other peoples’ blog posts and include a link to your website.
Post in forums related to your website and put a link to your website in the signature.
Write a Press release and distribute it to online press release directories.
Create a free report, include your link in the report and allow people to give it away for free.
Create online profiles on websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace and put a link to your website in your profile

These are just some ways to get a backlink to your website.

Usually when you submit an article, leave a comment on a blog or submit your site to a directory you will get a choice of the words to use in the anchor text of the link to your link. The anchor text is the clickable link that is usually underlined and in blue font. It is important to use your keywords in the anchor text wherever you can and this will help you to rank more highly in the search engines.

You will do better in the search engines if you keep your link building as natural as possible. You should try to:

Build your links slowly and steadily – don’t try to get thousands of links in the space of a few weeks.
Vary your anchor text – as well as using your keywords in the anchor text you should use variations of your keywords.
Avoid purchasing links or getting links from sites that are not listed in the search engines – although this won’t have a negative impact on your search engine ranking, it is unlikely to help. Google frowns upon bought links.

Finally, you shouldn’t just build links to your home page, you should spend some of your link building efforts building links to individual blog posts or pages. One of the quickest and easiest ways to do this is by using social bookmarking services to bookmark your blog posts. You can also learn about other deep link building techniques here.

I hope you found my five part SEO for Blogs series useful. If you have a comment or a question please feel free to post it below!

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SEO for Blogs – Part Four: On Site Optimization

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 12:18 pm

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In this post I am going to talk about on site optimization which is also known as on page optimization. I am assuming that you have already read part one, part two and part three of my WordPress SEO series and have done the following:

1) Chosen one or two keyword phrases for the home page of your blog

2) Made a list of less competitive keywords to use whenever you make a blog post.

First I am going to talk about optimizing your blog home page.

When you optimize the main page of your blog you will need to ensure that you mention your main keywords in specific places including:

1) The TITLE tag of your home page – this is the text that will be displayed in the title bar of your browser and is one of the most important places for SEO. If you are using WordPress and have installed All in One SEO pack it is very easy to add your keywords to your TITLE. Just click on “Setting” in the WP admin panel and click on “All in One SEO”. You will see a field called “Home Title”. Just put your main keywords in here and then click the update button. If you have more than one keyword phrase you can separate each phrase with a “|” character.

2) The META description of your home page – often this description is what people will see as a summary of your site when the search in Google so make sure it is descriptive and entices people to click on your website. Keep the description to a couple of sentences and include each of your keywords once. You can update your description via the All in One SEO Pack settings as described in 1).

3) The META keywords of your home page – many people wrongly assume that this is an important factor in SEO, but actually it isn’t. In the past this tag has been overused and abused therefore the majority of search engines simply ignore it. For completeness you can include your main keywords in here if you wish, but keep it to a minimum. A list of 5 or 6 phrases is much better than a list of 20 phrases. You can update your description via the All in One SEO Pack settings as described in 1).

4) In the alt attributes of images on your home page – there should be an alt attribute for every image on your page and it should contain a short description of your image. When you hover your pointer over an image on a web page you will see the alt text and these are heavily used by software that reads web pages for blind people. You can add your keywords to the alt text of some of the images on your home page but don’t overdo it. Adding your keywords to 2-3 images is usually enough.

5) Throughout the body text of your home page – it is very important that you mention your main keyword phrase(s) throughout the body of your home page. If your site is setup like a typical blog this can be more difficult as your home page will always be changing and your latest blog post will show first. To get round this problem you can either add your keyword phrases to some of the static parts of your page e.g. an introductory paragraph if you have one, some of the widgets within your home page, or you can edit the theme to add your keywords to the home page in various places. Alternatively you could setup your blog so that you have a static front page with snippets of the latest posts. If you do this you can easily include your keywords throughout the static part of your page. Again, don’t over do this. Less than 5% density is best.

6) In the H1 or H2 tags on your home page – If you have a main heading on your home page you will want to ensure that it contains your keywords. The H1 tag is ideal for this, but if you don’t have an H1 tag you can put your keywords in the H2 tag. Normally this will involve updating your theme and since every theme is different I am not going to go into detailed instructions in this post.

Next, the easier part. How to optimize your blog posts.

A lot of people just concentrate on the optimization of their home page and this is a huge mistake. If you target very low competition keyword phrases and base each blog post around a different keyword phrase you can easily multiply the traffic to your website. You should use the list of low competition phrases that you compiled earlier and every time you make a blog post do the following:

1) Put your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post.

2) Mention your keyword phrase 2-3 times throughout the body of your blog post.

3) Ensure that the permalink contains your keyword phrase (URL of your post)

4) Ensure that you have All in one SEO Pack set up so that the Post Title format is set to %post_title% | %blog_title% if you want your Title to contain both the blog post title and the blog title OR just %post_title% if you want to make the title contain only the post title. This will only work if you have put your keywords in the blog title.

That’s it! If you take the time to do on site optimization by optimizing your home page and each blog post for your keywords your chances of getting lots of traffic from the search engines will be much higher.

Look out for the final part of this series very soon where I will talk about off site optimization.

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