♦♦SEO Basics for Bloggers
Alright, bloggers and website owners. let’s sit down for a cupp’a tea and talk about S to the E to the O. What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimization and you’ve probably heard the term if you’ve been around the internet for a while. Why is it important? I will tell you…
SEO is important because, in simple terms, it is how people find your site in search engines. Search engine traffic can contribute to a huge amount of your visitors, and if done right, can boost your presence online. Without getting too technical, here are some tips for making your website or blog search engine friendly:
1. Title Your Posts Properly
Whenever you title a post, think about what you would search for in Google if you were looking for an article about the topic. Think about how other people might phrase the same search term and try to create your title from that. You don’t have to do this for every single post, just the most important ones that you actually want people to be able to find through a search.
Example of a bad title: She’s Got Wind in Her Hair…
Example of a good title: 7 Heat Friendly Summer Hair Styles
2. Speaking of Titles…
Your post title plays a very important role in SEO. Not only does it appear on the actual post page, but also in the browser’s title bar. To maximize the impact of your title, it’s best that your post title be thefirst element of the title that appears in the browser address bar. If you notice, Blogger does this a little backwards, placing the title of your blog before the title of your post. For example, “Name of your blog: Title of your post”. For better SEO, it should be formatted like this instead: “Title of your post: Name of your blog”. To change this in Blogger, you will have to get your hands a little dirty with some HTML editing. Open your HTML editor page and find:
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
And replace it with these codes:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/><title><data:blog.pageName/><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>
Now your post title will appear before the blog title, only if that page is a post page.
3. Your Content Matters
What a novel concept, right? Your actual article/post has to have some substance. If you can include popular search terms/phrases within the post, even better. For example, my 30 Day Shred post is my highest ranking search engine post, and still appears on the front page of Google if you search “30 Day Shred Results”. The term “30 Day Shred” appears multiple times throughout the post. Did you know that I do that purposely? As long as it flows with your content and doesn’t read like a bunch of random keywords or search terms, you should think about this when creating a post.
4. Stop Stuffing in the Keywords
Many people have this idea that search engines strictly read meta data and that you should fill your meta tags up with a bunch of keywords and descriptions to get the best results. This isn’t true at all. In fact, Google doesn’t even use the keyword meta tag anymore to crawl your sites. Stuffing your site full of random keywords can actually have a negative effect on your ranking. Those “labels” or “tags” you place on your posts are not there for SEO keyword purposes, they are there to categorize your content so others can easily find past posts under the same topic. If you overuse keywords on your page or in your coding, Google sees this as keyword spamming… and spammers never get anywhere in life
5. Use Text Instead of Images
When it’s possible to do so, use actual text instead of images. Obviously you can’t have a picture made of text, but if you have headings, for example, instead of making them graphic titles, keep them as text. Search engines can’t really read images for content (more on this below)… what they want is your text content! Even better? Wrap them in a heading tag <h1>Your Heading</h1>. Google looks for heading tags when crawling your site, so wrapping your heading in that little bit of HTML code helps for sure!
6. Image searches are cool too
Contrary to what I said above, Google can find your images, but in a different way. Instead of appearing in the text results, they appear in the image search results. To make the most of this, title your images properly. Instead of uploading a photo as IMG_920.jpg, title that image to match the topic of your post, for example, “seo-basics-for-bloggers.jpg” is something I would name an image in this post.
7. Get Yourself Out There
Probably the toughest part of any website marketing is getting your website out there, and linked on other websites. Websites with high rankings that link back to your website add value to your site. Google sees your site as a site that somebody important is talking about, and therefore wants to crawl you. Think of these as bonus points for your blog ;). The greater visibility you can gain for your site, the better. Share your links on social networking sites and get people to check you out.
8. Link Past Posts
Another trick is to link back to some of your past posts in your new posts that have to do with the same sort of topic. Whenever you have a link on a page, a search engine will crawl through it. Links are like doorways to more content. You want search engines seamlessly crawling your site… and often. The easier you make it for them to navigate around your website, the better. Example: see some more of my blogging tips!
9. Image Maps Help Nobody
I am begging you, please refrain from using image maps on your website or blog. Image maps help nobody. They don’t work properly in some browsers, and hinder navigation because your actual link is not truly attached to a single image. It’s like an invisible box floating above an image with a link in it. It makes no sense. Instead, you should check out my YouTube tutorial on how to create a header with image links properly.
10. Clean Up Your Website
Like I said above, links and text content make search engines crawl through your site seamlessly. If your site is full of clutter, random images and banners, and doesn’t have a good flow, it will be difficult to navigate through. Remove any old outgoing links, unused images, and clutter, and make your site more about the content than anything else.
Hopefully you will be able to take some of these tips and tricks and apply them to your site. I couldn’t cover everything in this post, but gave you some good starting points! SEO really starts with thinking about how you create a post. If you think of it in terms of what users would be searching for, then that is half the battle. Remember, there is no quick and easy way to get more traffic to your website. Nobody will market your site for you but you. It’s constant work, but once you start seeing your work pay off it’s worth it!
Let me know if you enjoyed these tips and if you think you can implement them into your blog!!!
♦♦Google Analytics Basics for Beginners
I’ve talked about the importance of knowing your numbers in the past, and if you haven’t yet set up a Google Analytics account, I highly suggest doing so if only to view some of your basic visitor stats. Setting up an account is a piece of cake. Just head on over to www.google.com/analytics and click that Sign Up button after logging in with your Google account. You will be asked to fill our your website information, so just follow the instructions until you get to your Tracking ID.
Get your tracking ID
The Tracking ID that is provided will need to go on every page you want to be tracked in your account. Normally, if you use WordPress or Blogger your site would have been created using a template, so you would only need to install this tracking code in the HTML of the template file. If you own a website with separate HTML files and no master theme/template file, you will need to install the tracking code on each HTML page individually.
Google tells you that your Tracking ID should go before the </head> code of your template. If you are comfortable with editing your HTML template file, go ahead and add it there. If you are a Blogger user and are not comfortable with editing your HTML yet, just add it as a new sidebar “HTML/Javascript” widget and it will work the same.
Once set up, it will take up to 24 hours for your site to start displaying data, so don’t fret if you think it’s not working right away. You’ve just installed the code, so everything from this date forward will be tracked. It is not possible to view past data from before you installed the code because nothing was being tracked at that time.
From here on out, you can login to www.google.com/analytics at any time to check your data. Once logged in, you will click on your website URL that you added and your dashboard will appear:
The overview page will show you most of your basic stats including how many Visits, Unique Visitors, and Pageviews you’ve had in the selected time period (top right). The sidebar contains your reports for various things. To keep this super simple, we are only going to look at a couple of the essential reports in this post. The first being the Referrals report.
Where do your visitors come from?
Under Acquisition choose All Referrals. Here a list will appear which will show you how many visits a certain website has referred to you. This is great information because you are able to easily see where your visitors are coming from. Clicking on one of the URLs will open up another page which will list the particular pages of that website that your visitors came from. If you’re curious about the website and what they said about you, you can click on the little icon beside the link to open the page up:
What are your visitors searching for?
Next up let’s look at the Search Engine Optimization report. Under Acquisition again, choose Search Engine Optimization and then Queries. Here you will see a list of the daily top 1,000 search terms that visitors used on Google to find your site, as well as how many impressions you received for that search term. You will also see how many people clicked on your link after searching, your average position on Google, and your CTR (click-through rate).
In the sidebar once again if we click Landing Pages, you can see which pages those visitors landed on after searching for you. Clicking Geographical Summary in the sidebar will then tell you where in the world your visitors came from.
These basic stats are essential for building your blog and following. Now, if you have a potential advertiser asking you your numbers, you can confidently tell them your monthly Visits, Unique Visits, Visitor Demographics and Pageviews. Knowing this data, you can tailor your future posts to suit your readership, modify your SEO, and just have a better overall outlook on your blog from a reader’s perspective. There is much more information that can be found inside Analytics, so take a peek around and do it often!
♦♦The Future of SEO: What To Know
If you asked me many years ago how to rank well in search engines, I would have told you it was all about keywords, link building, and meta data and explained what DMOZ was. Today, however, search engine optimization has greatly changed and will continue to change over the course of the year. You simply can’t get by anymore with the old tricks that were once so common because the internet has evolved.
I’m going to give you a few pointers that you should pay attention to if you’re concerned about visibility in search engines. SEO is no longer about stuffing your meta tags with keywords or building your website for search engines. Nowadays, you’ll want to scrap the idea of building for Google, and focus on building for actual people.
Social Media
Social media plays a huge role in SEO now. Which is why it’s imperative to get your brand onto all of those social networking sites. The more social media shares you gather, the better. The more influential people who share your content… even better! SEO is (now more than ever) about social interaction and bases your ranking on the amount and quality of social reach. Being a Google product, Google+ plays an important role in this as well. If you’re not on Google+ yet, get on that! But don’t just sign up and let your account go stale. Build your following, generate shares for your content, and develop an online presence on the network. You’ll be glad you did!
Content
Your content, of course, plays a huge part in SEO as well. Creating content for humans (i.e. no keyword-stuffed articles specifically made for search bots) that resonates with a particular readership or demographic is always your best bet. Create targeted content with the potential for high share rates and you’re golden.
Go mobile! If you haven’t made sure that your content is available on mobile devices, you could be hurting your traffic. Your site should be viewable on tablets and other devices, and your best option is to design a responsive theme for better readability. Users want content quickly without having to browse around your website. Mobile users should become a priority.
Link Building
Link building is not what it once was. It’s not about submitting your link to as many places or directories as possible anymore, but instead about getting your link on high quality sites. This enforces to the search engines that you are a trustworthy site that people are talking about. Is this step more important than the others? Absolutely not. By building your brand/website you have a greater chance of being noticed by the “big guys”, so that of course should be your first step.
You’ll notice that you can’t do one of these three things without the other. Social media, link building, and content run hand in hand. Create your content, share it on social media and get people talking about it, and hopefully if you’ve done a great job some high quality sites will pick it up and share your link. Don’t shy away from submitting your stories or content to these high quality sites either.
Alright, bloggers and website owners. let’s sit down for a cupp’a tea and talk about S to the E to the O. What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimization and you’ve probably heard the term if you’ve been around the internet for a while. Why is it important? I will tell you…
SEO is important because, in simple terms, it is how people find your site in search engines. Search engine traffic can contribute to a huge amount of your visitors, and if done right, can boost your presence online. Without getting too technical, here are some tips for making your website or blog search engine friendly:
1. Title Your Posts Properly
Whenever you title a post, think about what you would search for in Google if you were looking for an article about the topic. Think about how other people might phrase the same search term and try to create your title from that. You don’t have to do this for every single post, just the most important ones that you actually want people to be able to find through a search.
Example of a bad title: She’s Got Wind in Her Hair…
Example of a good title: 7 Heat Friendly Summer Hair Styles
2. Speaking of Titles…
Your post title plays a very important role in SEO. Not only does it appear on the actual post page, but also in the browser’s title bar. To maximize the impact of your title, it’s best that your post title be thefirst element of the title that appears in the browser address bar. If you notice, Blogger does this a little backwards, placing the title of your blog before the title of your post. For example, “Name of your blog: Title of your post”. For better SEO, it should be formatted like this instead: “Title of your post: Name of your blog”. To change this in Blogger, you will have to get your hands a little dirty with some HTML editing. Open your HTML editor page and find:
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
And replace it with these codes:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:else/><title><data:blog.pageName/><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>
Now your post title will appear before the blog title, only if that page is a post page.
3. Your Content Matters
What a novel concept, right? Your actual article/post has to have some substance. If you can include popular search terms/phrases within the post, even better. For example, my 30 Day Shred post is my highest ranking search engine post, and still appears on the front page of Google if you search “30 Day Shred Results”. The term “30 Day Shred” appears multiple times throughout the post. Did you know that I do that purposely? As long as it flows with your content and doesn’t read like a bunch of random keywords or search terms, you should think about this when creating a post.
4. Stop Stuffing in the Keywords
Many people have this idea that search engines strictly read meta data and that you should fill your meta tags up with a bunch of keywords and descriptions to get the best results. This isn’t true at all. In fact, Google doesn’t even use the keyword meta tag anymore to crawl your sites. Stuffing your site full of random keywords can actually have a negative effect on your ranking. Those “labels” or “tags” you place on your posts are not there for SEO keyword purposes, they are there to categorize your content so others can easily find past posts under the same topic. If you overuse keywords on your page or in your coding, Google sees this as keyword spamming… and spammers never get anywhere in life
5. Use Text Instead of Images
When it’s possible to do so, use actual text instead of images. Obviously you can’t have a picture made of text, but if you have headings, for example, instead of making them graphic titles, keep them as text. Search engines can’t really read images for content (more on this below)… what they want is your text content! Even better? Wrap them in a heading tag <h1>Your Heading</h1>. Google looks for heading tags when crawling your site, so wrapping your heading in that little bit of HTML code helps for sure!
6. Image searches are cool too
Contrary to what I said above, Google can find your images, but in a different way. Instead of appearing in the text results, they appear in the image search results. To make the most of this, title your images properly. Instead of uploading a photo as IMG_920.jpg, title that image to match the topic of your post, for example, “seo-basics-for-bloggers.jpg” is something I would name an image in this post.
7. Get Yourself Out There
Probably the toughest part of any website marketing is getting your website out there, and linked on other websites. Websites with high rankings that link back to your website add value to your site. Google sees your site as a site that somebody important is talking about, and therefore wants to crawl you. Think of these as bonus points for your blog ;). The greater visibility you can gain for your site, the better. Share your links on social networking sites and get people to check you out.
8. Link Past Posts
Another trick is to link back to some of your past posts in your new posts that have to do with the same sort of topic. Whenever you have a link on a page, a search engine will crawl through it. Links are like doorways to more content. You want search engines seamlessly crawling your site… and often. The easier you make it for them to navigate around your website, the better. Example: see some more of my blogging tips!
9. Image Maps Help Nobody
I am begging you, please refrain from using image maps on your website or blog. Image maps help nobody. They don’t work properly in some browsers, and hinder navigation because your actual link is not truly attached to a single image. It’s like an invisible box floating above an image with a link in it. It makes no sense. Instead, you should check out my YouTube tutorial on how to create a header with image links properly.
10. Clean Up Your Website
Like I said above, links and text content make search engines crawl through your site seamlessly. If your site is full of clutter, random images and banners, and doesn’t have a good flow, it will be difficult to navigate through. Remove any old outgoing links, unused images, and clutter, and make your site more about the content than anything else.
Hopefully you will be able to take some of these tips and tricks and apply them to your site. I couldn’t cover everything in this post, but gave you some good starting points! SEO really starts with thinking about how you create a post. If you think of it in terms of what users would be searching for, then that is half the battle. Remember, there is no quick and easy way to get more traffic to your website. Nobody will market your site for you but you. It’s constant work, but once you start seeing your work pay off it’s worth it!
Let me know if you enjoyed these tips and if you think you can implement them into your blog!!!
♦♦Google Analytics Basics for Beginners
I’ve talked about the importance of knowing your numbers in the past, and if you haven’t yet set up a Google Analytics account, I highly suggest doing so if only to view some of your basic visitor stats. Setting up an account is a piece of cake. Just head on over to www.google.com/analytics and click that Sign Up button after logging in with your Google account. You will be asked to fill our your website information, so just follow the instructions until you get to your Tracking ID.
Get your tracking ID
The Tracking ID that is provided will need to go on every page you want to be tracked in your account. Normally, if you use WordPress or Blogger your site would have been created using a template, so you would only need to install this tracking code in the HTML of the template file. If you own a website with separate HTML files and no master theme/template file, you will need to install the tracking code on each HTML page individually.
Google tells you that your Tracking ID should go before the </head> code of your template. If you are comfortable with editing your HTML template file, go ahead and add it there. If you are a Blogger user and are not comfortable with editing your HTML yet, just add it as a new sidebar “HTML/Javascript” widget and it will work the same.
Once set up, it will take up to 24 hours for your site to start displaying data, so don’t fret if you think it’s not working right away. You’ve just installed the code, so everything from this date forward will be tracked. It is not possible to view past data from before you installed the code because nothing was being tracked at that time.
From here on out, you can login to www.google.com/analytics at any time to check your data. Once logged in, you will click on your website URL that you added and your dashboard will appear:
The overview page will show you most of your basic stats including how many Visits, Unique Visitors, and Pageviews you’ve had in the selected time period (top right). The sidebar contains your reports for various things. To keep this super simple, we are only going to look at a couple of the essential reports in this post. The first being the Referrals report.
Where do your visitors come from?
Under Acquisition choose All Referrals. Here a list will appear which will show you how many visits a certain website has referred to you. This is great information because you are able to easily see where your visitors are coming from. Clicking on one of the URLs will open up another page which will list the particular pages of that website that your visitors came from. If you’re curious about the website and what they said about you, you can click on the little icon beside the link to open the page up:
What are your visitors searching for?
Next up let’s look at the Search Engine Optimization report. Under Acquisition again, choose Search Engine Optimization and then Queries. Here you will see a list of the daily top 1,000 search terms that visitors used on Google to find your site, as well as how many impressions you received for that search term. You will also see how many people clicked on your link after searching, your average position on Google, and your CTR (click-through rate).
In the sidebar once again if we click Landing Pages, you can see which pages those visitors landed on after searching for you. Clicking Geographical Summary in the sidebar will then tell you where in the world your visitors came from.
These basic stats are essential for building your blog and following. Now, if you have a potential advertiser asking you your numbers, you can confidently tell them your monthly Visits, Unique Visits, Visitor Demographics and Pageviews. Knowing this data, you can tailor your future posts to suit your readership, modify your SEO, and just have a better overall outlook on your blog from a reader’s perspective. There is much more information that can be found inside Analytics, so take a peek around and do it often!
♦♦The Future of SEO: What To Know
If you asked me many years ago how to rank well in search engines, I would have told you it was all about keywords, link building, and meta data and explained what DMOZ was. Today, however, search engine optimization has greatly changed and will continue to change over the course of the year. You simply can’t get by anymore with the old tricks that were once so common because the internet has evolved.
I’m going to give you a few pointers that you should pay attention to if you’re concerned about visibility in search engines. SEO is no longer about stuffing your meta tags with keywords or building your website for search engines. Nowadays, you’ll want to scrap the idea of building for Google, and focus on building for actual people.
Social Media
Social media plays a huge role in SEO now. Which is why it’s imperative to get your brand onto all of those social networking sites. The more social media shares you gather, the better. The more influential people who share your content… even better! SEO is (now more than ever) about social interaction and bases your ranking on the amount and quality of social reach. Being a Google product, Google+ plays an important role in this as well. If you’re not on Google+ yet, get on that! But don’t just sign up and let your account go stale. Build your following, generate shares for your content, and develop an online presence on the network. You’ll be glad you did!
Content
Your content, of course, plays a huge part in SEO as well. Creating content for humans (i.e. no keyword-stuffed articles specifically made for search bots) that resonates with a particular readership or demographic is always your best bet. Create targeted content with the potential for high share rates and you’re golden.
Go mobile! If you haven’t made sure that your content is available on mobile devices, you could be hurting your traffic. Your site should be viewable on tablets and other devices, and your best option is to design a responsive theme for better readability. Users want content quickly without having to browse around your website. Mobile users should become a priority.
Link Building
Link building is not what it once was. It’s not about submitting your link to as many places or directories as possible anymore, but instead about getting your link on high quality sites. This enforces to the search engines that you are a trustworthy site that people are talking about. Is this step more important than the others? Absolutely not. By building your brand/website you have a greater chance of being noticed by the “big guys”, so that of course should be your first step.
You’ll notice that you can’t do one of these three things without the other. Social media, link building, and content run hand in hand. Create your content, share it on social media and get people talking about it, and hopefully if you’ve done a great job some high quality sites will pick it up and share your link. Don’t shy away from submitting your stories or content to these high quality sites either.
What to Expect
If you haven’t already, you’ll start to see search engines focusing on the websites with great content instead of the ones that have horrible or outdated content which have made their way into rankings via old fashioned SEO tricks. This is a good thing! However, it also means that you have some work to do yourself. You’ll need to boost your online presence and establish yourself as somebody who produces great content… and the time to do that is now.
♦♦Google Algorithm Update – Save Your Blog From Extinction
Today Google rolls out their latest algorithm update, which has been dubbed “mobilegeddon” and will affect millions of websites across the world.
Back in February of this year, Google announced that it would be making some dramatic changes to the way sites are ranked in its search results, favouring mobile friendly layouts above all else. With a significant increase of mobile searches over the past few years, Google wants to be sure that their users are receiving the best possible experience when browsing on their devices.
What does this mean for you?
If your blog or website isn’t mobile friendly, you will see a significant decrease in mobile search traffic. Note that this is said to not affect desktop search traffic or tablet traffic, and is for smartphone searching only.
Luckily, you can save yourself from smartphone extinction by implementing a mobile friendly theme. If you use a Blogger blog, head on over to the Template page right now and choose to use a mobile template if one isn’t set. You do NOT want this setting to be turned off!
If you are a WordPress user who currently isn’t using a responsive or mobile theme, you can try installing a plugin that will help with the process such as WP Smart Mobile Theme Plugin, WPtouch Mobile Plugin, WP Mobile Plugin or WPmobile Apps.
If you’re unsure if your blog is mobile friendly, you can check it easily using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Just enter your URL and view the results.
I hope this helped to save your blog from being demoted in search! If someone else could use these tips, share this post with them!
If you haven’t already, you’ll start to see search engines focusing on the websites with great content instead of the ones that have horrible or outdated content which have made their way into rankings via old fashioned SEO tricks. This is a good thing! However, it also means that you have some work to do yourself. You’ll need to boost your online presence and establish yourself as somebody who produces great content… and the time to do that is now.
♦♦Google Algorithm Update – Save Your Blog From Extinction
Today Google rolls out their latest algorithm update, which has been dubbed “mobilegeddon” and will affect millions of websites across the world.
Back in February of this year, Google announced that it would be making some dramatic changes to the way sites are ranked in its search results, favouring mobile friendly layouts above all else. With a significant increase of mobile searches over the past few years, Google wants to be sure that their users are receiving the best possible experience when browsing on their devices.
What does this mean for you?
If your blog or website isn’t mobile friendly, you will see a significant decrease in mobile search traffic. Note that this is said to not affect desktop search traffic or tablet traffic, and is for smartphone searching only.
Luckily, you can save yourself from smartphone extinction by implementing a mobile friendly theme. If you use a Blogger blog, head on over to the Template page right now and choose to use a mobile template if one isn’t set. You do NOT want this setting to be turned off!
If you are a WordPress user who currently isn’t using a responsive or mobile theme, you can try installing a plugin that will help with the process such as WP Smart Mobile Theme Plugin, WPtouch Mobile Plugin, WP Mobile Plugin or WPmobile Apps.
If you’re unsure if your blog is mobile friendly, you can check it easily using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Just enter your URL and view the results.
I hope this helped to save your blog from being demoted in search! If someone else could use these tips, share this post with them!
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