TEN VITAL SEO TIPS FOR BLOGS TO HELP YOU MAKE MONEY ONLINE

All Bloggers and Webmasters want to rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages) for as many highly searched keywords as possible – this is quiet natural because a high position in SERPs for different keywords highly increases the chances of getting free, targeted and vital search engine traffic. After starting a blog the primary aim of most bloggers is to earn a decent income from their blogs and it is seen search engine traffic is the most valuable in terms of monetizing your blog as they are searching for some targeted information so they are most likely to click on relevant affiliate or CPC ads so more money can be made. Thus more Search Engine Traffic is equivalent to more Opportunities to Make Money Online. Traffic from other sources such as social media, forums, classifieds and etc seem to be less targeted and are much less monetizable. This post – TEN VITAL SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TIPS FOR BLOGS has been written to give you an idea of the important points that you must remember while writing your blog posts so that they are properly optimized for the search engines and thus help you to earn money online.

Achieving a high position on SERPs for different highly searched keywords can be difficult, but with proper planning and focus on writing your blog posts applying basic search engine optimization techniques, you can boost your position for specific keyword searches and thus increase your blog’s traffic. Just follow these basic 10 Search Engine Optimization tips while writing a post on your blog to get the better results :-

1. Do Keyword Research – It is very important to do keyword research before you start writing a post. Keyword research will let you know which topic is people wanting to read about and are being actively searched for in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and etc. This is essential because if you want to get traffic from search engines then you must be knowing what topics people search for in search engines. Then you need to write posts on those topics. To know which topics are hot in a particular niche you can take help of tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz Index or Wordtracker etc. These tools will also help you to find out the exact number of times different keyword phrases or search terms that the people use to obtain or search information on a particular topic. Note down the keyword phrases or search terms with their respective search volume.

2. Picking The Most Effective Keyword Phrases – Select a topic to write a post and then pick a relevant keyword phrases from the list that you have built in the previous step to optimise your post. Pick one or at most two keyword phrase for a particular post. Picking more keyword phrases for a particular post will confuse the search engines and give you poor results.

3. Keyword Length – Do not choose short generic keyword phrase to optimise a post like “make money” or “make money online” because competition will be very high and it will take a lot of time (building thousands of keyword optimised back links) to get to the first page of SERPs. But rather choose more specific terms like “make money online promoting affiliate products” or “make money online starting a blog” etc. You must also remember that long tail keywords are searched less in compared to short generic keywords. But if you can have say 25 or 50 posts optimised for long tail keywords with average traffic volume then the combined effect will be much more powerful. Moreover the home page is to be optimised with the high traffic short generic keywords.

4. Use Keywords In The Post Title – Search engines be it Google or Yahoo or MSN give high value to titles will ranking pages in search results of relevant terms. So definitely include the keyword that you want to optimize your post for in the post title. Try to format the title in such a way that the keywords come in the beginning as the search engines reads from left to right. Also make the titles as short as possible by striking out unnecessary words as lesser the number of words that are there in the title more will be the weight given to each word.

5. Subtitles and Sub-Headings – Break down your post into small sections and use sub-titles or sub-headings to name each section. Include your keywords into these sub-titles. Also make the sub-titles bold. This has three utilities :-

•    It breaks the post into small sections thus making it easier for the reader to scan the post in one-go (which many readers want).•    It makes the post easily comprehensible and visually appealing.

•    It gives additional chances for you to use your keywords thus making the post much more optimized for the search engines for that search term for which you want to optimize your post.

6. Use Your Keywords In The Post Body – Include the keyword or keywords that you want to optimize the post for in the post body. But do not over do it by just stuffing the post body with keywords as this will be considered keyword spamming by the search engines and also it will not make any sense to your readers. So include keywords just in a natural way to the point that it makes sense to your readers and you will avoid keyword spamming automatically. Bold your keywords only once or twice in the whole body as search engines seem to give importance to bold words. Also use different variations of the keywords in different parts as far as possible to give a natural look to keyword inclusions.

7. Optimize Your Pictures – Include your keywords in the alt tags and in the name of your pictures – this will give further relevance to your post and help it in ranking higher for relevant search terms as the search engines including Google gives importance specially to the alt tags. Also using relevant keywords will also help you in getting traffic from the Image Search feature of different search engines including Google. Remember to use different variations of your keywords in the alt tags to make this look natural to the search engines. Never repeat the keywords within the same alt tags and do not use more than one keyword or keyword phrase in one image as that will be equivalent to spam.

8. Optimize Internal Links – Link each page from other pages in your blog and do this as often as possible as search engines gives special importance to these internal links. More the number of internal links a page receives from the other pages more is its importance in the eyes of search engines. Use relevant anchor text that is your keywords relevant to the page to which you are linking in the anchor text when doing internal linking. You may also consider using the Title Tag which tells something more to the search engines about the page to which you are linking. Also as much as possible make the surrounding text of the link relevant to the page to which you are linking as this gives greater relevance to the page to which you are

linking because Google attaches more relevance to links coming from relevant pages and for doing so it considers the surrounding text. Of course it is not always possible to follow these rules strictly but so just try to do as much as possible.

9. Optimize External Links – It is much more important to optimize the external links (links coming from other sites or blogs) in the same way as done to internal links. Though it is out of our capacity to control the links that are coming from blogs owned by others but we can control the links that we put in the articles that we have submitted in the article directories, we can control the links in our guest posts that is when we submit posts to be published in blogs owned by others and etc. All incoming external links are highly valued specially so if they come from relevant sites and pages with high page rank and with relevant anchor and surrounding text.

10. Miscellaneous – Avoid Block Quotes and Java Script as far as possible. Do not post only a video as a post but do give a heading and write a few words describing the video including your keywords as described above – this is because search engines cannot read videos but the text will help it in understanding what the video is about. Also upload the video in major video sites like YouTube, MetaCafe, Google Video etc to get extra traffic.

Follow the above points to get a better Search Engine Optimized Blog. This is not the Holy Grail to Search Engine Optimization but I can say that if you follow this basic rules you will get a blog that is better optimized for Search Engines and thus help you in improving your blog’s position in search engine results.