With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort.
Search engine optimization, or "SEO" is the method of applying technical and non technical techniques to a site to insure that the site appears on the list of search engine results when someone is looking for something that is featured on your site.
I did some online research and received some great tips from other site managers on how I could improve the SEO for my website, and I've distilled those tips into some basics that are relevant to any content site that wants more search engine traffic.
Many sites just starting up would have to focus more than I do on getting incoming links, which is how Google ranks sites (more inbound links = more authority).
Also, it's important that in seeking increased traffic, you don't go overboard with SEO-motivated site changes: if you create dummy pages and links just to increase your site's exposure for a particular keyword, Google will catch on and lower your ranking.
With these caveats in mind, here are some SEO tips to consider:
Get both inbound and outbound links. While Google ranks your sites importance on the number of inbound links coming from other sites, it gives much more weight to in links from authority sites.
Use headlines and title tags with the keywords up front. As you consider search engine optimization for your site, you should think about the most important keywords that people will use when searching for your site in Google.
The search engines seem to put more weight to keywords that show early in the page title. One of the drawbacks of using these keyword rich headlines is that you are unable to use the creativity that tabloid newspapers do.
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include keywords. Similarly, it's important that the URL for each story contains the keywords from your headline and even the category for the story.
4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. If you grab the first sentence or use the same meta-description on every page, it's nowhere near as relevant as the description that Google can pull itself from your site, so, if your description is the same on all the pages, you are better off removing it and letting Google auto-generate it.
5. Highlight your best content on every page. One feature that is common on major news sites is a list of "Most Popular Stories" or "Most Emailed Stories." Having that list in a prominent place on your site, on all pages, would bring more traffic (and inbound links) to your site's best content, and serve as an entree into the site for people who just came to read one post.
Many readers will leave the site after reading only one they read the post they came for, but if you make it easy for them to find your very best work then they might stick around and read more or may even subscribe to your blog feed if they find your content compelling enough.
Limit the use of title tags and categories and use just the one that is most important. You should highlight only the important categories and put the others on a different page. Using too many tags will create a bunch of links that aren't really useful. The best practice is to use tags for just the most important keywords.
7. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images. Google recommends that publishers submit special "sitemaps" to help the search engine to index your pages. Sitemaps are dynamic XML files that you submit to Google and are used by their spider to index your content.
Search engine optimization, or "SEO" is the method of applying technical and non technical techniques to a site to insure that the site appears on the list of search engine results when someone is looking for something that is featured on your site.
I did some online research and received some great tips from other site managers on how I could improve the SEO for my website, and I've distilled those tips into some basics that are relevant to any content site that wants more search engine traffic.
Many sites just starting up would have to focus more than I do on getting incoming links, which is how Google ranks sites (more inbound links = more authority).
Also, it's important that in seeking increased traffic, you don't go overboard with SEO-motivated site changes: if you create dummy pages and links just to increase your site's exposure for a particular keyword, Google will catch on and lower your ranking.
With these caveats in mind, here are some SEO tips to consider:
Get both inbound and outbound links. While Google ranks your sites importance on the number of inbound links coming from other sites, it gives much more weight to in links from authority sites.
Use headlines and title tags with the keywords up front. As you consider search engine optimization for your site, you should think about the most important keywords that people will use when searching for your site in Google.
The search engines seem to put more weight to keywords that show early in the page title. One of the drawbacks of using these keyword rich headlines is that you are unable to use the creativity that tabloid newspapers do.
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include keywords. Similarly, it's important that the URL for each story contains the keywords from your headline and even the category for the story.
4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. If you grab the first sentence or use the same meta-description on every page, it's nowhere near as relevant as the description that Google can pull itself from your site, so, if your description is the same on all the pages, you are better off removing it and letting Google auto-generate it.
5. Highlight your best content on every page. One feature that is common on major news sites is a list of "Most Popular Stories" or "Most Emailed Stories." Having that list in a prominent place on your site, on all pages, would bring more traffic (and inbound links) to your site's best content, and serve as an entree into the site for people who just came to read one post.
Many readers will leave the site after reading only one they read the post they came for, but if you make it easy for them to find your very best work then they might stick around and read more or may even subscribe to your blog feed if they find your content compelling enough.
Limit the use of title tags and categories and use just the one that is most important. You should highlight only the important categories and put the others on a different page. Using too many tags will create a bunch of links that aren't really useful. The best practice is to use tags for just the most important keywords.
7. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images. Google recommends that publishers submit special "sitemaps" to help the search engine to index your pages. Sitemaps are dynamic XML files that you submit to Google and are used by their spider to index your content.
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