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Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers

Posted on February 18th, 2009. Written by mobiledummy.

Bloggers are often limited by small marketing budgets and manpower. But that doesn’t mean they can’t compete against larger businesses or websites when focused on search engine optimization. SEO is a basic marketing tool that everyone should use regardless of size.

I often asked myself if small bloggers like me can compete with larger websites or bloggers when it comes to search results. My opinion is that size doesn’t matter. When it comes to improving search results, it’s all about the keywords you choose and how competitive those keywords are.

One way to determine the competitiveness of a search term is to simply type that search term into Google and notice the number of web pages that contain that search term. This number appears in the upper right-hand corner of the search results page and appears as, “Results 1 – 10 of about 228,000,000 for [your search term here].”

The large number you see gives you an indication of how many websites contain the keyword term or phrase you’re searching for. Not all of these sites would necessarily be competitors, but have been indexed by Google. From my perspective, when this number is less than 3 or 4 million, the particular search term would not be all that competitive in and of itself.

There are a variety of methods to determine true keyword effectiveness. However, if you’re just a regular person trying to figure out how difficult it will be to rank well for a particular keyword, consider the following. In addition to the number of sites that contain your keyword, how well optimized are the top 3 sites that appear on the search result. You can determine this by:

1. Visiting the site and determining the Google PR of the page. This information is available by downloading the Google toolbar and looking in your browser. You will see a green bar and ranking (ex: PR5), which tells you how Google ranks this page/website with regard to popularity. Any site with a Google PR6 or better is well established and will be difficult to outrank in the near term.
2. Visit Google and type, “link:http://mobiledummy.com”. Be sure to replace ‘mobiledummy’ with the website name you are researching. Remember, this should be a website that appears on the Google search result for the keyword term or phrase you’re researching. This will tell you how many sites are linking to this particular website. The larger the number the more difficult it will be to outrank.

Using the above will give you a good sense of whether or not you can compete for given keywords. I am no expert, but with few SEO tricks I will boost my blog through out the web!