Part 4 – On Page Search Engine Optimization
By now you should have a blog filled with content that you wrote with passion. It should be a very interesting vine for the community of your chosen location, rather than a lifeless fact sheet.
No matter how good your content is, if no one reads it, you won't be able to make money from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you need to provide engaging information. very simple.
However, to get traffic to your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines such as www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, and www.msn.com, to name a few popular search engines. So, to attract these people to your blog, your blog needs to rank well in the search results pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click on your blog!
The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, but that doesn’t stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”, but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.
For now, let's figure out which keywords you want to optimize your site for. For example, your blog talks about technological gadgets. Now you'll want to check with Google if this is a very competitive keyword. At the time of writing this article, there are 29,000,000 search results. Think you can beat 29,000,000 sites on the first try? I don't believe it.
Now let's try to narrow our scope. Let's search for "tech gadgets" instead. At the time of writing this article, Google lists 792,000 results. It's more manageable, but you'd like to search for more specific keywords. However, let's optimize your blog for "tech gadgets" just for the sake of learning.
First, you should pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you're optimizing for tech devices, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like "Your best tech gadget blog!" would work great. You can change your blog title in Blogger control panel or Wordpress blog when you create it. If you're good with HTML, you can even do it on other blog engines like Moveable Type. At the end of the line? Learn some HTML!
Conclusion:
On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. This includes optimizing the content and HTML source code of a page. Some of the most important on-page SEO elements include:
- Title tags: The title tag is the text that appears in the search engine results page (SERP) as the title of the link. It should be a concise and accurate description of the page's content.
- Meta descriptions: The meta description is a brief summary of the page's content that appears in the SERP. It should be a clear and compelling description of the page that includes relevant keywords.
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.): Header tags are used to structure the content of a page and indicate the hierarchy of the information. The H1 tag is the most important and should be used for the main title of the page.
- Content: The content of the page should be well-written, relevant, and include relevant keywords.
- URLs: The URL structure of a page should be simple and include relevant keywords.
- Images: Images should be optimized with appropriate file names and alt tags.
- Internal linking: Linking to other pages on your website can help search engines understand the structure of your website and the relative importance of your pages.
- External linking: Linking to other relevant websites can also help to improve the visibility of your website in search engines.
By taking care of above mentioned on-page SEO elements will help you to improve the visibility of your website in search engines. It's not only help to improve the visibility of website but it will also help to improve user experience.
However, this is the most important part of all. Always keep in mind that you are writing for real people who read your blog for information, so spamming your blog with keywords is very stupid! In fact, if you do this, search engines will eventually think you're spamming and cause your rankings to plummet...so keep that in mind! Write for people, not search engines!