A blog does not stop with ownership. Work has to be done such as getting it optimized for search engines. Your blog has to be made search engine friendly, that is to say, it must meet certain expectations of the “crawlers” or “spiders” of search engines. The index that these crawlers have created will be used in ascertaining the status of your blog in terms of relevancy to the requests of users.
Good strategies for search engine optimization that should be fully implemented include the following:
Credible domain name
Acquire a domain name that is not too long or difficult to remember. It should relate to the content of your blog. Within the domain name, there should preferably be keywords that a crawler will understand. Abbreviations, dashes, underscores, numerals and other meaningless characters should all be avoided. Always try to get .com name if possible, simply because it is a more common term that customers think of.
Titles should be rich in keywords
The titles for all of your pages should be keyword-rich. They should be easily understood by visitors, and more importantly should contain keywords that will relate to whatever your customers may want to search for. In search engine optimization, search engines often use the [TITLE]; element as the text for their link to your blog. Emphasis is placed by search engines in this area of optimization because it enables them to determine the relevance of your blog to a visitor’s search. The titles for your pages should preferably be less than 50 characters including spaces. This enables you to select a title that is precise, and one that will not be truncated in search results for reason of length. For immediate impact, include your call to action, so that attention of visitors can be captured.
Include META elements
Description and keyword properties should be included in your headers’ META elements. META name=”description” content=”[brief description of your blog]” is often used by search engines to find out what your blog is all about. It will be beneficial to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. You can think about how they will go about searching for information, and you can subsequently choose appropriate terms that will capture traffic to your blog. A great research tool to use is Wordtracker.
Quality of content
It is imperative to provide good and rich content on your blog. The content should always be keyword-rich, as this facilitates good classification of your pages by the search engines. It must be interesting and entertaining. Quality is the keyword as far as content is concerned. This is one strategy for search engine optimization that should be given heavy consideration. Content should therefore be fresh and should never be a duplicate. Search engines now include in their search algorithm ways to effect measurement of freshness of content on all blogs. Do note that spiders cannot read images, so remember to use ALT tags for images if you need to use them to increase your blog traffic.
Links leveraging
Blogs that get incoming links do get a higher ranking. If these incoming links originate from a blog with higher ranking and which perform well for key phrases that are related to your content, these are good links of quality that will push up the ranking of your blog. They will greatly benefit your blog. It will be to your advantage to request them to link back to your blog. Everything on your blog must be properly linked; all links must be functioning, because this will enable all of your content to be indexed. This shows a good strategy for search engine optimization in operation.
Blog registration
Your blog must be registered with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) once it is sufficiently optimized. Instructions given by each search engine are different from one another, so it is important to follow instructions closely, to avoid having your blog improperly indexed. For best results, do it right – straight from the beginning.
Virtue of patience
Patience pays. It may take some time to reach Google No 1 spot. The time spent on search engine optimization for your blog will definitely not be lost just because the top spot is not reached yet. There are still numerous other ways of capturing traffic besides performing a little more tweaking of your blog.
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