5 Blog SEO Tips To Start Your Week

I figure most of us dread Monday mornings…the commute, the traffic on the commute, the people…ughh. I’d be willing to bet that Monday is our least productive day next to Friday. But why not start the week with a few little steps that us bloggers can take to better our SEO and start ranking higher in the search engines? They don’t take that long to implement, and once you do, typically you won’t have to bother with it anymore (unless you change themes..but more on that later). So take notes, because here we go!

5 Simple Blog SEO Tips

1. Keywords - Have you really sat down and thought about how you want people to find your blog in the search engines? So, so many bloggers start up a blog based on a central topic, and they think targeting “dog training” is enough. WRONG! First of all, the odds of doing well with a highly competitive keyword like that is slim in the beginning anyway, so you need to take a look at some good keywords with less competition. How many of you have a list of keywords saved somewhere that you want to work on? I’d bet some of you don’t. Well, how about you take today to sit down and write out 20 phrases (go for 3-5 words) that you think match your site. There are a couple benefits to this, as you’ll see on paper what your overall theme is about, and you’ve also effectively just made 20 blog post titles that you can (and should) write an article on! Once you have all of these down, head over to this free keyword tool, start inputting your keyword phrases, and see what kind of a search volume each one commands. Look, even if you chose one that gets only 20 searches a day, that’s fine! That means you have a chance at ranking high for that phrase, and also, you stand a chance of gaining an additional 20 visits to your site a day for life! (In theory, of course). Again, write a nice 300-500 word article for each keyword, make sure not to use the keyword too much in the article (use it only in relevant sentences, or it will look like spam), and post it up! You’d be surprised at how much you can benefit from this, and I will cover keyword targeted articles in the future, as there is much more to be said…but this is a start.

2. Sitemap - Although a nice sitemap doesn’t have a direct effect on your rankings, it has a major indirect effect, as it helps the major search engines crawl your site more efficiently and makes them aware of all your content in one nice little file. I’m surprised at the amount of bloggers that don’t have a sitemap, as bloggers tend to have large amounts of pages indexed. Why not make it easier for the search engines to find you? Here is a nice sitemap generator plugin that you can upload, activate, and configure in seconds. It will generate a very well organized xml-sitemap that you can submit to Google webmaster tools (if you haven’t already). Take the time to do this if you haven’t already, it’s very easy, and can help you out tremendously for the long run.

3. Anchor Text - Search engines place a high value on proper anchor text when counting a backlink to your site. If your site is about “car sales”, you want people linking back to you with proper anchor texts with a relevant keyword like “car sales”, or “auto sales”. What I mean is, don’t ever, EVER use “click here” when linking to someones page. I dare say that if you do that, you may as well not link to them at all, because it’s not helping much. So get in a good habit of using relevant and related anchor text when linking out, because not only does it help them, it also helps you! Search engines will find your link much more interesting if it’s properly anchored. If you see that someone used “click here” to link to you (or something equally lame), don’t feel bad in sending them a quick email asking them to change it to a better keyword. It’s beneficial for both parties, and the other webmaster usually won’t mind at all.

4. Clean House - If you’re serious about ranking well for your keywords, pay attention. Google and friends rank your page based upon many factors, some we know, and some we don’t. What we do know is that one factor is the way your code looks on the back end. Search engines do not like dirty, cluttered code, and it can honestly hurt your rankings by having a mess of unorganized code behind that beautiful blog of yours. I know, most people don’t have a clue how to clean up code (me being one of them), but there are many, many people on popular webmaster forums that would happily clean it up and optimize it for you for a small fee. Hire a trusted forum member who happens to be a code monkey to take a look and see what he/she can do for you. This may cost anywhere from $10-$50, so be sure to negotiate the price, and get it over with. Again, if you don’t plan on changing themes any time soon, you won’t have to do this again for a while, and it can reap great rewards as far as your rankings are concerned.

5. ALT Tags - Did you know that whenever you post an image to your blog, that you are given an option to name it, in case the image fails to load? That way, if someone loads your blog, and an image is broken, they can still see what the image was (assuming you named it correctly). It’s called an ALT tag, and it looks something like this:

<img src=”boat.gif” alt=”Big Boat” >

A lot of folks don’t take the time to take advantage of the alt tag text, or they name it something irrelevant. But wait! Did you know that there are SEO experts that have confirmed a slight boost in rankings by naming your ALT text with the relevant keyword? Pretty cool, eh? Now, they’re not saying that it’s going to get you to number one if you use good ALT tags, but it just may give you an edge over your direct competitors. Mainly, the ALT tag is great for image SEO, so make sure you name it what it really is. The above is a good example of how you would name a picture of a big boat. That way when people search for “big boat” in a search engine’s image search, you have a chance at showing up. So start taking advantage of the ALT tag, and when you get the time, you should go back to each and every image in your site and ALT tag them appropriately. You can thank me later.