What the heck is SEO?

This is a great question for those of you who have no idea or are a bit confused on what SEO really means.

SEO simply means search engine optimization or search engine optimizer. You might be saying okay now I know what those letter stand for but how the heck does it work?

I’ts the process of increasing the amount of visitors to your website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP-Short for search engine results). The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that your site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward your site. SEO helps to ensure that your site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Now doesn’t that sound good?

Here are some helpful tips for your blogs to increase traffic and use SEO correctly.

Creating a SEO Friendly Blog

When creating a blog choose a title and URL that is search engine friendly and use keywords. Pick a topic and use it in your URL. Remember, a URL should not be more than 20 letters in length. This way the URL is easy to remember and type.

By using keywords in your URL and blog title, the search engines can relate searches to your blog.

If you are using WordPress there are many SEO plugins that give multiple options to help your search engine friendliness. Some themes have search engine options built into them already. Make sure you visit all the options and set them up. Just having the plugin or theme with SEO options built in is not enough if you do not set them up. Choosing a theme that is not complicated and that does not have “dirty CSS” coding is key also. You want the web crawlers to be able to read your content easily.

Creating A SEO Friendly Post

Each post you write on your blog is another chance for more traffic to your site. Create on topic posts using the topic as the keywords in the post, slug, tags, and categories. you can search for related keywords with Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Make sure you have keywords in the first sentence and last sentence. You can also use bold and italics to emphasize keywords. This helps the web crawlers understand the topic of the post. Link to content that is related to your blog post that is outside of your site. This will build relevance to your post.

If you have SEO options, fill them in with your keywords and create a description that is attention grabbing that includes your keywords. People searching for the topic will see the description. You want them to choose your site over the other search engine results.

Tracking SEO Results

You need to know if your SEO efforts have paid off. There are several ways to do this. Doing a simple search for your keywords is one way to see if you come up where you want to in search engine results. You can also use tools like Google Webmasters tool, your analytics program, and plugins to track your visibility. You should be looking how many times a certain keyword or keyword phrase was searched and a visitor arrived to your site, how much traffic is from search engines, and the most popular topics searched.

SEO is a very large topic and there are many steps involved in getting it right. You might not get it all at first but continuing to learn about it and finding with works for you is key. Search engine optimization is key to gaining more exposure and traffic for your blog.