SEO - 8 Basic Uncomplicated Steps


by Daryl Lau - Date: 2007-04-17 - Word Count: 709 Share This!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an important piece to the internet marketing puzzle. A search in Google will show 128 million results which goes to show the importance placed by many in this area. All these can be quite hard to fathom for someone who is totally new to SEO and its many concepts such as white hats and black hats.

Instead of diving into the more comprehensive and complicated part of SEO which even for me is an ongoing learning process, I would like to share the simple basic steps I've learnt so far along the way. Just by doing this, I believe you would be so much better off than millions of bloggers who doesn't, thus dramatically improving the search engine driven traffic to your blog or site.

Kindly note that some of these steps are more towards those hosting their own blogs especially with Wordpress or Typepad.

Step 1 Sticking To One URL
Don't split all your countless hours of promoting efforts into half by having both 'http://www.yoursite.com' and 'http://yoursite.com'. Choose one and direct all traffic to this preferred domain of yours. All marketing efforts also should be targeted to only this domain. This can be done easily by editing your .htaccess file or via a WP plugin.

Step 2 Built Into Title and Meta Tags
Ensure that the keyword of your choice is included into your Blog Title and Meta tags located in the section of your blog source code. Here are some examples based on the keyword 'online games':

Step 3 Permalink For Your Posts
It simply means a URL that points to a specific blog post which is permanent. Picking the one that includes your keyword will help significantly rather than a short numbered permalink. The screenshot on the right will give you a clearer picture which shows the available choices for Wordpress.

Step 4 Choosing The Right Keyword
You can do so simply by using the free Overture Keyword Selector to get an idea the popularity of the keyword you have in mind. The screenshot on the left is an example of a highly popular keyword which many might overlook. By looking at that example, if you have a Tech blog and you make a post on '2000dpi copperhead gaming laser mouse' with good keyword positioning, you can expect a huge surge in traffic once it is indexed by the search engines. To make it even sweeter, you can include an affiliate program selling that particular or similar product to that post.

Step 5 Include Keyword In Post
If you look at search engine results for your individual blog post, it also includes a short summary of the article itself. So make sure you use the keyword in you blog post without diluting the article. Do keep in mind that the main objective of your post is for your visitors to read and gain knowledge so quality content should always be your priority.

Step 6 Using ALT tags on Images
A lot of bloggers do not take that little extra time and effort to insert an ALT tag to the images they add on their blogs including myself especially on my blogspot blogs. All you have to do is include this code in your tag: alt="keyword" which complete image code should look like this without additional attributes.

Step 7 Help Spiders Navigate
This is to ensure the search engine spiders crawl your blog effectively by guiding them using a sitemap. If you are using Wordpress, you can easily do so with a Google Sitemaps plugin. It is also important to track how your blog is being crawled by using Google Sitemap and Yahoo Site Explorer.

If your blog is quite extensive, you might want to tell the spiders which posts to exclude from being added to their database by using a robot.txt file.

Step 8 Link Building
Last but not least is building links to your blog. You can start off by submitting to directories and then exchanging links with related blogs pertaining to your blog topic. Bear in mind it is not the quantity but quality of links which will help you greatly in your SEO efforts. One of the best way to obtain links is writing good and useful content which others would want to share with their own readers.


Related Tags: seo, keyword, search engine optimization, url, title, meta tag, permalink, image alt

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