After my last post, I spoke with several bloggers who needed a few fundamental SEO tips for their blogs. Let’s take a look at some basic, must-know SEO facts, do’s and dont’s.
SEO and Keywords
1. Use keywords in the titles of your pages.
2. Use variations of the same keywords throughout your post.
3. Proximity of keywords matters (Let’s say you’re going for the phrase “Make money online” – The phrase “Make money online blogging” counts more than “Make money blogging online”)
4. Use keywords for categories and tags
SEO and Backlinks
1. Get anchored backlinks from relative sites.
2. Do not pay for backlinks.
3. Do not use backlink circles. ie. Site A links to Site B which links to Site C. Site C then links back to Site A creating a circle of one-way links. Google doesn’t like this!
4. Google “reads” backlinks so even a URL shown on a “no follow” site, will get indexed.
SEO and Images
1. Alt tags are essential.
2. Titles of images matter.
3. Flash is lousy for SEO – Search engines are limited on reading the content embedded in Flash.
SEO Tracking
1. Use Analytics AND other tools for tracking visitors- once you see what they like, you can do follow-up posts targeting the same keywords.
There you go- a handful of basic SEO do’s and dont’s for your blog. Feel free to share your own tips in your comments!
