Optimizing your SEO

When I first started, I had no clue what SEO even stood for, let alone how to “optimize” it. SEO stands for search engine optimization. In simple terms, it means how easy it is for search engines to find you.

Search engines send out these bots that “crawl” websites looking for keywords. It sounds kinda creepy thinking of bugs crawling all over your site, but they are actually kind of helpful. This is how search engines like Google discover the content of your site. That is why it’s important to take steps to make sure search engines not only find you, but rank you higher than other pages.

Here’s a few tips on how to do this

1. WordPress versus Blogger: I started out on Blogger because it seemed like a less complicated platform, which it was. The only problem was that Google was asking, “Crunchy, who?” I got virtually NO traffic from search engines while on Blogger. The SEO design of WordPress is much better. If you aren’t afraid to take a leap, I HIGHLY recommend having your page on WordPress over Blogger. You can thank me later!

2. WordPress Plugins: For those on WordPress, there is a great plug in that really helps with SEO. I use the All-in-One SEO plug in. It’s a great widget that appears at the bottom of each of your drafts where you can pick your own keywords (we will go over keywords in just a moment)

It also allows you to put in your own description. This is what the bots are going to see that the  article is about. Make sure you that your description is concise and explains what the article is all about.

3. Strong Keywords and Anchor Text: Keywords are the words that people use to search. You want to keep that in mind when you are writing. The more often you say a keyword in your post the more likely that the search engine will pick up that keyword.

You don’t want to be redundant and obvious about it. It really is an art form to get strong keywords in there without sounding like a broken record, but you will get the hang of it as you post more often with keywords in mind.

A great tool to use when trying to find keywords is the Google Keyword Tool. This tool allows your to see how many searches a month Google gets for particular keywords. It also tells you the competition level for that particular keyword.

For new blogs, you are going to want to find keywords with a decent amount of searches and a relatively low level of competition. This will assure you will be on the first few pages of Google, and people will be more easily able to find your page!

Anchor text is keywords that have links attached to them. These are really the ones that pop out to the search engines. If you want to learn more specific information about anchor texts, check out the post I wrote about making strong anchor texts here.

4. Forums: Forums are a great way to get more rank to your page. Every time a site links into your page a little bit of that page rank is given to your site. So, in theory, if you link up to a site that has higher page rank than you do, you get a little bit of it’s juice. It’s also a great way to spread the word about your blog. The more you get your name out there, (without sounding  like a used car salesman) the more traffic you will get to your page.

These are just the basics to get you started on optimizing  your SEO. It is definitely worth your time to invest in researching this topic and being more aware of it when you post. Before I started working on SEO optimization, I would get less than 10 visitors a day from ALL search engines. Now I average a 100 visits a day from Google alone.

Give it a try! You might just find that with little changes you see a great growth in the amount of traffic you receive from search engines, and we all like traffic right?