Simple SEO Tips for Bloggers

A lot of my clients know that blogging about their products and services is an important part of marketing in today's social media crazed cyber world. Yet, they are not quite sure how it will help them with their search rankings. Regardless of what platform you use (Blogger, Drupal, WordPress, etc.) make sure you follow these best practices for blogging as they will assist with your SEO efforts.

* Identify a few targeted keywords that you want to be ranked and found by the search engines. These keywords will need to be the most common words used in your blog post and make sure they are in the title, URL, used in outbound links and are bolded.

*Change your permalink (i.e. permanent URL) structure to show the title of your blog post rather than the default URL (ex. "yourblog.com/?p=123"). This will make it easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

* Write the title of your blog as a headline in order to grab the reader's attention but also include targeted keywords because your blog will get archived and your titles can become searchable.

* Categorize your content so it allows the aggregation of content according to themes, thus making it easier for search engines to understand your content and giving you a better chance of ranking well on particular topics.

* Keep the content fresh in order to keep the readers and search engines coming back. From a search engine perspective, if your blog is updated frequently, it will attract the attention of spiders and causes more crawling and faster indexing, thus allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly.

* Create internal links by deep linking anchor text to product and/or information pages on interior pages of the site.

* Encourage interaction through comments. This will help create a more active community, which will translate in more content, traffic and eventually higher rankings.

Effective SEO techniques for your website

Let’s get real. Getting great search engine rankings is not rocket science. Also, easy and effective SEO doesn’t cost the White House. The thumb rule: Create a real site for real people. And let inbound links come naturally, to your website. Caution: Don’t pay for links, it’s ugly and controversial too.

So how do you gain inbound links? First off, don’t be content with a website, but include a blog with tons of content, to attract more traffic. A good blog will grow content fast and always pay off in the long run.

Sometimes, you do all the things right but still don’t get the ranking right for your website. Here’s a big tip to boost your search engine rankings: Provide the search engines with sitemaps to your website. The sitemap essentially speeds up the search engines like Google and Yahoo to spider, index and rank your web pages, so that what used to take months now happens real quick. The search engines will find your site, search it, index it in their database, and most importantly, show your site high up in the search results. As you grow your blog, your new posts will be easily spidered, indexed and ranked because of your sitemap submissions. Now, you are on way to becoming an SEO specialist – and keep your White House!