Bloggers usually try to concentrate on the quality of content. It's true that we all love blogs because in most cases people know what they wright about and quite often this is a source for really valuable information. However, many bloggers face the same problem - people simply don't know about their existence. SEO for blogs is very important aspect that is able to turn a "secret" blog with few visitors into popular place and a source of profit.
As blogs are a specific type of website, they require a little bit different approach and the following tips may help you to gain more traffic to your blog.
Strategic Keywords Placing
The principle of work of all search engines is almost the same - they use spiders to categorize, index and rank all content on websites. Google, MSN or Yahoo - they all search relevant content and index it. If you want to see your blog well indexed, you should follow the following techniques:
- All search engine robots always reach the title of your blog (<title>). Place your keywords here in order to be rated higher.
- You may have heard about the importance of <h1> headers, but heading tags (<h2>) and also often crawled. When you write new post for your blog try to incorporate your keywords in <h2> tags for better results.
- Robots do not see images, so they ignore them. The only thing they don't ignore concerns textual descriptions to images (so called alt description). Never neglect adding descriptions to your images, especially if your blog is reach in graphics (e.g. travel or photo blogs).
- Your outbound and inbound links should always contain keywords. As they are always crawled by spiders, this will add extra points to your rank. Also try to use keywords in anchor text (the text that each link contains). Pay special attention to backlinks (links from other websites to your) and make sure they always contain keywords.
- Keyword density is a popular method of creating relevant content. Keyword density means how frequently are keywords shown in your page's content. Try to write posts with a density of approx. 3%. If you use keywords more often, this may annoy readers or, in worst situation, robots may consider this page as a spam one. When keyword density is less than 1%, robots may simply not notice keywords.
- Instead of repeating keywords monotonously, try to use synonyms. Search engine robots index them too. This way you will make your posts readable, at the same time increasing their value for robots.
More Links Better Rank
Work over creating quality links to your blog. Links from sites with similar thematic are most valuable for your rating. Spiders consider these sites competitors and when a competitor posts a link to your blog, for search engine this is a proof of proficiency and high class of your website. No need to say, this positively affects your rank.
One more advice concerns long-lasting inbound links. Search engines usually like aging links as for them they are a proof of organic link-building. On the other hand, broken links are something that should be avoided. When you have internal links to non-existent pages or links to websites that already don't work, this can have negative consequences to your rating.
Search Engines' Mechanism of Work
All search engines use their own mechanisms of work or algorithms. They are not clearly known as this information is considered secret. This is the reason why almost all SEO tips include information concerning link building and keywords - these are "universal" methods that work for all search engines.
In the situation with Google make sure you have robots.txt file and sitemap. Robots.txt is used to show Google spider what sections of your blog are allowed for indexing.