Blog SEO magic part 1 – boosting your search engine visibility
Published by on November 28th, 2007 2 Comments »
We all love new visitors to our blogs, and the search engines are a key weapon in flagging down passing readers. But how do you get yourself noticed amongst all the others vying for search engine prominence?
There is the one element, above all, you must consider in order to become more visible on the search engines – particularly Google.
Your page title is everything
The title of your page – the text that appears at the very top of your browser – is treated with some reverence by search engines in determining what a page – or blog post – is about. Your first step is to ensure that your blog post titles are accurate representations of the content and contain the key words and terms that people might be searching for. Before writing a new post, spend a few minutes doing a little research on the terms people are actually searching for and write your title accordingly. Page/article titles which match closely to searched terms will be much more likely to grab the attention of the searcher.
How do you find out what people are searching for?
Never consider your search behaviour as being representative of the rest of the internet, so research is vital to targeting potential new blog readers.
- Wordtracker.com – expensive, but considered as the best for keyword research
- Overture search tool – free, but a little clunky, not as up to date as Wordtracker, and sometimes suffers server overload
- SEO Book keyword tool – additional useful free research tool
Your title terms are being abused by your blog
Have a look at the browser title of one of your blog posts. You will almost certainly see that the main title of your blog comes before your blog post title. Most blog applications arrange the title by default in this way.
Search engines weight the importance of the first words and phrases it finds in the title of a page or blog post. Therefore it is essential that you swap these two elements around, ensuring the blog or page title appears before the main site title. Click on any blog post on this site and you will see just that.
Switching the two may be a matter of installing a plugin (Wordpress users can use SEO Title Tag) to do it automatically, or you must make a small change to your blog theme template, physically putting one before the other.
This is just the first step
There is a lot more to optimising your blog for search engine success, but this is the first and most critical step. This step alone is unlikely to leap you right to the number one spot for a common search term, however. But considering your blog post headlines and ensuring those headlines appear first in the page title, will guarantee you improved placement in search engine results, and therefore more visitors. Try it and do let me know how you get on.
More blog SEO magic to come.
Since implementing the techniques I will cover through a number of posts, this blog has gone from no reader growth to steady reader growth, doubling of the percentage of returning visitors, and a measurable increase in the average number of page views per visit.
2 Responses to “Blog SEO magic part 1 – boosting your search engine visibility”
I have a question – what’s a bog post?
Or did you fail to poofread this properly?
Damned new laptop keyboard – no, really. My better half failed to proof it – probably because she was at work