Are you ready for it? … There really are no top secrets! SEO masters want companies to think there are all these secrets so they can charge a lot for doing simple tweaks that get Google juicy. If you are using Wordpress then you are already ahead of the game. A few wordpress plugins are available that do the job for you.
Lets go over a few SEO tricks, they are not secrets they are known facts.
SEO and Titles:
To get the best bang for the buck the title of the post should have keywords or key phrases that people actually search for in google. Example- if someone were to search for a tutorial they would not just type in Photoshop, as this is too broad, they would type in “how to remove background using photoshop” or something to that affect. I did a keyword search using Google and found photoshop tutorial to be a highly searched term so you could include another keyword search term into the title by titling it “Photoshop Tutorial: How to remove background using Photoshop”. Now you have two keyword phrases in the title.
What you read in the browser bar title is important. The post tile should be before the blog name or do away with the blog name all together. Anything more like categories or dates added to the title in the browser bar just waters down the SEO power you built up writing the post title. Think about it, if you added that text each time you wrote a post your readers will be confused and SE’s will be too.
SEO and Keywords:
So you’ve learned about keywords in titles of post. Keywords or phrases in the post body are no different. You want to repeat the keyword 2-3 more times throughout the body per 500 words of text. Keep it natural. Too much keywording and you will get punished. Using the example above you would start out your post with the keyword in the first sentence. Why you ask, because the first few sentences are usually what google will scoop up to place below your listing on the search results page and this will get syndicated through RSS. So first sentence would read “In this photoshop tutorial I will easily show you how to remove the background using photoshop”. Easy. You’ve just added the keywords two more times, that equals 4 times and you’ve only written one sentence. A word about creative writing. I know some people like to write creative post titles thinking it will get visitors. You are wrong to think this way as most people online are looking for something specific and will not search for those words. If your title wont stand on its own and tell you exactly what the content is then you have failed. An example is Perez Hilton, the titles are vague. You would never guess what he is talking about. One last thing: Bold those keywords throughout your post.
SEO and Anchor Text:
What is anchor text? It’s the Perez Hilton link above. You see a lot of blogs and they link using “get the rest here” or “source”. Stop this now! Tell people what the link is going to and you tell Google you are a resource for that keyword phrase. So above I linked the text “Perez Hilton” to an blog entry at Blizme. This tells the reader and Google that you will get information on Perez Hilton. Make sure what you are linking to is about the anchor text link otherwise you get spanked by Google. If you are using trackbacks for your posts that is essentially a recipricol anchor text link and your blog is getting Google orgasms. It’s why so many spammers are using trackbacks to vampirize your page rank.
SEO and Internal Links:
I’m sure you’ve heard that more links from other sites back to you the better. This is true but you might not know that internal links are just as good. What’s an internal link? They are anchor text links that link to pages on your own site. If you can’t link to pages on your own site because each posts topics are too different then you will loose the Google game. Each post on your site should be able to reference another. Start writing posts to accommodate this habit. Using our post tile example above you can easily anchor text link the “photoshop tutorial” text to another photoshop tutorial on your site and then in that post link back creating an internal reciprocal link.
SEO and External Links:
It’s been said that external links drain your page rank. This is true if you haphazardly link to irrelevant things. You want to link to things that back up what ever you write about in your posts. I use Matt Cutt’s Linkify tool. Drag the tool link to your browser bookmarks bar. Switch to html edit mode in your text editor and then select the keyword text you want to link out to. Hit linkify on the bookmarks bar and a sidebar will open giving you highly ranked google links to anchor to. I always use the Wikipedia link as it has a bunch of information about that topic. You are positioning your post as a resource and Google and your readers will thank you. If you look at the first sentence in this post I have anchored SEO to wikipedia. It will let the SE’s know that this post is all about SEO.
SEO and Linkbacks:
Linkbacks work just like internal links. You’ve heard about blog commenting as a way to get linkbacks right? Well they do you know good coming from a blog with content that has nothing to do with yours. Only post your link on PAGES that have content that is relative to your blog. Remember its called page rank not site rank. If a blog is about Britney Spears and you write about photoshop and you link back to your blog you are confusing the SE’s. I’m not saying you can’t comment on Perez Hilton. Just don’t leave a link in the url field to your photoshop blog insert a link to your facebook.
SEO and Images:
This is huge! So many top bloggers screw this up. You must name your photos with keyword phrases. Lets use Perez Hilton for example. He posted recently about actress Cynthia Nixon and cancer . The title of the picture in this post says nothing about the content. The title is wenn1809295__oPt.jpg. Obviously its the designation for Wenn the photo agency. Perez should have renamed the photo with “cynthia-nixon-breast-cancer-confession.jpg”. Use the title post name and put dashes between each word other wise you get the ugly %20% in between each word when viewed in browsers. If your blog software lets you add descriptions and alt text then fill this info out. If you start titling images like this your Google search traffic will double. Just make sure the image title is close to post title, that way people will not be turned off when they go to your site and you titled every image Paris Hilton naked and the content is about photoshop tutorials.
Good Luck on your SEO journey!
