Basic SEO tactics for bloggers

July 12, 2005 | By Duncan | Filed Under Guides and Tutorials

Bloggers are amazing for a number of different reasons, but one that has always stood out for me is the need for bloggers to be experts in many different fields, from writing, to design and marketing and advertising to name but a few. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for those who might not be familiar with the term, is, according to Adwordsedge, a general term used to describe specific techniques that can be used on websites in order to rank favorably with search engine. It can also apply as a term to describe people who actually do SEO for a living, as a noun as opposed to a verb.

But for this guide we’ll take a look at the search engine optimization as another tool in the ways you can promote your blog. This guide is by no means complete, or even heavy in detail, but is meant as a basic view of tactics and things that work to assure that you blog can be found, and hopefully discovered by people using search engines.

Domain name
If you’re serious about getting a good spot in the search engines, or even about blogging in general, you need your own domain name. First and foremost they are cheap, so there is little excuse for you not to own one. I can go back to 97 when I first bought a domain name, I think I paid about $120 USD for 2 years for it. Today I pay $8.95 per year, and some sites charge even lower than this. Hosting for your domain is pretty cheap as well, with plenty of quality offerings out there for under $10 USD per month, of even $100 USD per year. Some can be as low as a couple of dollars a month, the price of a cup of coffee.

Structure
There are two schools of thought in regards to the structure of your domain name: practical or colorful. Practical domain names involve at least one key word that states the topic of your blog, but ideally more. For example Weblog Empire’s The Gadget Blog has the URL of www.thegadgetblog.com Unimaginative, sure, but highly practical. Another example is PVRSpot, the Weblog Empire PVR News and views blog with the URL of www.pvrspot.com. One keyword in the URL followed by another word that isn’t relevant but tries to be catchy. For colorful go straight to Gawker Media and do not pass go…domain names such as Kotaku, Gawker, Wonkette to name but a few. Personally, as you can see I generally prefer practical, because having keywords in the URL make it easier for your blog to be picked up for those keywords in Google. Colourful domain names are great, but lose on two counts for me: firstly they are harder to get search engine traffic from, and secondly they can be difficult to spell as well, which can mean lost traffic.

Hosting
There are lots of different thoughts on hosting when it comes to search engine optimization, and I’m not going to pretend that I know which ones are right. There is more information in my guide here for DIY Blog Hosting that may be of interest if you are looking for a host, but as a rough list there is some things I can share from experience. Firstly, there are no major problems with shared hosting. Some people will tell you that shared hosting is the root cause of all evil and it can hamper you in getting your site indexed. I’ve never experienced it over maybe half a dozen hosts in the last 3 years. Personally I have my own a unique IP address for my sites that’s exclusive to the network not each blog. This is usually a cheap add on for many hosts, so if you are concerned about shared hosting I’d recommend getting your own IP address just to be sure.

Meta-tags
Make sure your blogs have appropriate information in the meta tags so the search engines now what they are looking at. Most major blogging packages will allow you to do with from within their administration areas.

SEF Blog URLs
More available here on this one.

Links
Links are the No.1 most important feature of getting a decent place in the search engines, and subsequently in building your site. First and foremost though: don’t go out and do silly things like setting up link farms (sites that are there for no other reason than to provide links) or posting to FFA Links pages, because generally speaking they don’t work. There are some legitimate strategies for getting links to your blog.
- Link from your own blogs if you own others is the easiet one. In may case I can usually get most search engines to visit within 24-48 hours to a new site using my own blogs alone.
- Swap links with like-minded bloggers: put up a notice saying your happy to swap links, or if you see someone else with a similar notice take up the offer. Where possible keep roughly on topic where you can
- Buy links: text links are the best in terms of SEO, make sure where possible its not behind code/ script and don’t pay top dollar. Even if its a week or a few weeks, you get picked up more by search engines and you’ll even get some extra traffic as well.
- Comment: seek out like minded blogs and comment on them, although they may not count with sites that use link=nofollow (a tag that blocks search engine tracking if you like) it exposes you and your blog to new readers who then might visit and put links on their own blogs. Its always important to remember secondary effects as well. Weblogs Inc., has the best blogs now for commenters because they reward commenters with a table which ranks their posts and provides links to their sites. Please though, with all blogs, make sure that you are interested in the post and you’ve got something useful to say. Never, ever comment spam.
- Advertising: although they are not suppose to make a difference I’ve found Google Adwords helpful in building a bit of extra traffic which has then provided links as well, secondary effect again.

I hope this is useful for those perhaps new to blogging or as a refresher to others. If your more interested in SEO tactics there are any number of sites out there on the subject you can read, but my final advice is this: if you don’t feel confortable with the tactics being suggested by myself or anyone else out there on the net: don’t do them. Many tactics suggested elsewhere are morally wrong, and in many cases break the rules at the major search engines. Sure, some can deliver short term gain, but they rarely ever deliver long term gain.

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Comments

18 Responses to “Basic SEO tactics for bloggers”

Quick Online Tips on July 12th, 2005 3:24 am

Nice tips. Thanks.
Yvonne Foong on July 12th, 2005 11:38 am

Thank you. I have thought little about megatags . Its about time I make use of them
Mobile Phone Fan » Blog Archive » Good domain name is important on July 12th, 2005 11:54 am

[…] secondly they can be difficult to spell as well, which can mean lost traffic. Read more here.

This entry was posted

on […]
ConÃ¡nn on July 12th, 2005 2:35 pm

Great post, but I think well structured content is only second to the content itself. You can have great content but if your headings are “a” tags in a div it will mean nothing to a search engine. h1 for page titles h2 for entry headings etc. Google understands markup more then content and uses it for relevance, a “strong” tag will never be seen as important as a “h3″, its just bold text.

I have a very low page rank but I come up in the first ten on all the keywords I am trying to get, that said I am not #1 for generic words such as “blog” but for “artist blog” I am right where I want to be, “sutton ireland” even for funny ones “Che and Castro”. I put thisÂ down to good mark up as I never figured on google till I changed the way I work.

Most all bloggers use some form of content management system (blogger, wordpress or the like) and though it is confusing at first it is important to ensure that the template does not hinder your efforts to get the placement your content deserves. After all content is king!
Zulu on July 12th, 2005 7:36 pm

Hi,
Thanks for the great article. Can you tell me -why- it is that it helps to have your own domain name? I’m using a free blog spervice - Blogspot - and I’ve suspected that it may not index well in MSN or Google because it is a free service, but is there any hard evidence for this claim?

It’s taken me a long time to figure out all there is to know about blogging on Blogspot and I’d hate to have to start all over again unless it’s guaranteed to give me a better placement in the search engines.
Easy Bake Weblogs » Basic Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers on July 12th, 2005 8:10 pm

[…] ref=”http://andywibbels.com/”>

Andy Wibbels

Duncan has a primer on SEO for Bloggers (via Darren).

This […]
Dan on July 12th, 2005 9:48 pm

I’ve stopped bothering with meta tags so much since i heard that google ignores them. Is that true? If so what use do you see for meta tags if the number one search engine ignores them?
ConÃ¡nn on July 13th, 2005 4:54 pm

google ignores keyword meta tags but I think it will still use description meta tags.

I did a little research on the domain thing and you are bang on I was amazed at how much of an effect it was having on a couple of google searches.
Baz L on July 15th, 2005 2:21 pm

Yeah,

I’ve read many articles like these before. And I’ve tried many of the things in there. I have a question. If I went out and got a text link from another blog with similar content, and that blog’s page has been indexed and rescanned, and you can clearly search for “deletemyspam.com” in google and come up with many search results, why haven’t they indexed me?

I have done all the right things in my opinion and it’s been over a month. Many people report results withing 24 hours, some a week or two. I also have the XML site maps running.

So someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong, why does google hate me?
Toby on July 16th, 2005 11:13 pm

Thanks for putting together some great information.
kev on August 15th, 2005 8:54 am

finding it very funny that where i put links to artglassireland.com you are putting alpha glass. good luck. by the way i have nothing to do with this website anymore.
J.Smith on August 19th, 2005 12:10 pm

I have a question? If anyone could be so kind to help me. My local newspaper ran this article and I’m wondering if this guy (and his parnter) are legitimate Search engine optimizing professionals?

I just don’t want to get into something that is illegal or will hurt my reputation. Thank you.

Here’s the link:
http://www.chieftain.com/business/1123999200/1

Here’s the article:
Seated on a couch at the Wireworks coffee shop at Mesa Junction, David Skul’s office is anywhere he can use his laptop computer.

The world is his office
By JOHN NORTON
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
In his sport shirt, shorts and sandals, anyone spotting David Skul sitting around a coffee shop with his laptop computer might think he’s spending his day off playing video games - instead of managing a global company with hundreds of employees.

Skul’s father, Frank, spent 29 years with the former CF&I Steel and vowed his son would never work in the mill. David Skul never did follow in his father’s footsteps, but he didn’t have to leave Pueblo to be a success.

“He said he’d never see me work in the mill,” Skul recalls, “so I spent my time with electronics, math and computers.”

And he’s still doing that as CEO of a number of companies mining revenues from the growing field of Internet marketing.

Skul has been doing computer consulting for several years through his local business, Relativity, but in recent months he’s been setting up Web sites aimed at boosting traffic to other sites.

Internet marketing has come a long way since the first banner ad was spread across a search engine page.

With billions of Web sites on the Internet and almost as many people searching for them, it’s an insurmountable challenge for most Web page designers to get noticed.

Gone are the days when search engines like Yahoo! welcomed e-mails from Web page designers and quickly added their sites to the engine’s databases. Now it takes more than just setting up a domain to get noticed. And with tens of thousands of links popping up in a search, anyone who wants to show up on that first page needs to know what it takes to get there.

That’s where text link experts like Skul come in.

What they do is the modern equivalent of the contractors that adopted names like “A-1″ or “AAA-something” to be first in the Yellow Pages.

For a fee, businesses like Skul’s Linkaquire, and others he runs, will add links to directories they set up, using the kind of keywords that will draw in search engines. He also arranges reciprocal links between Web pages that help each other attract business.

Getting noticed takes a combination of using the right keywords, in the text or embedded in the source code, and generating traffic. Search engines are sensitive to high-traffic sites and tend to rank them higher on their lists.

What also helps to drive traffic are those reciprocal links that bounce hits from one to another.

Knowing what makes Web surfers click on a particular link is a growing psychological science, “There are 100 factors of how people will evaluate you,” said Skul.

And there are ranking rules and Webmaster guidelines that people in the business have developed but, Skul says borrowing a term from the newspaper business, “It’s all about what’s above the fold.”

Skul is not the only person doing this.

It’s not unusual to find Nathan Anderson who founded a business called Metawebs that develops methods of spreading links, sharing the Wireworks couch with his laptop running, too, as he works with contractors and clients.

Anderson and Skul also have a customer-client relationship with their businesses.

How do you make money doing this?

By creating hundreds, even thousands of Web sites, each of which generates revenue every time someone uses one of their links to get to your clients’ page.

That revenue can run from a fraction of a cent - while generating thousands of hits - to $20 for some specialty businesses who know only serious customers are coming in.

“If you’ve got 5,000 sites, making a buck a day, it adds up quickly,” he said.

KRT GRAPHIC

To create those pages and market them globally, Skul has contracted with companies in India with 80 people working in Bangalore and another 40 in Hyderabad, 28 highly-skilled programmers in Romania and he’s setting up his own work force in Bangkok, Thailand, with the potential to employ 600.

As much as he’d like to use American workers, he said that when he looked for people, “The bids mostly came from California and they were so astronomically expensive.”

In addition, the Indians know the business and need little direction. “They’re so able and willing to work. They know the game,” he said. “You don’t have to hold anybody’s hand.”

That doesn’t mean it’s any easier to use foreign workers. “Outsourcing is very daunting,” said, “You learn hard lessons.”

Nevertheless, he said he has hired some people locally, including the son of a local school teacher who attends the University of Northern Colorado who has Web design skills.

And as his company grows, he hopes to add more management staff to his Pueblo operations, now run out of his home or wherever he can use his computer.

“We’re going to be giving opportunities like that all the time,” Skul said.
Nathan Anderson on November 4th, 2005 2:31 pm

He’s real!

David’s a great guy, and his business is for real.

I’m real too. In fact, I’m typing this on the couch of the Solar coffee house downtown.

Just contact the people named in testimonials on our sites, and you’ll get the real scoop.

-Nathan
David Skul on November 4th, 2005 2:41 pm

I was using the search engines today in the cafe and stumbled accros this blog.

I just wanted to thank you for you interest in my services.

The answer to your question is yes both Nathan and myself are real SEO professionals. But let me clarify that a bit.

Nathan is a top notch SEO and honest good guy while I provide promotional services for websites. So when you are done using Nathan’s services you contact me to get search engine placement results.

If I can help you in any way, please call and let me know. Since you are local, we should sit down and chat.

God bless you.

David C Skul
CEO - Linkacquire.com
WebtrafficJunkie on January 20th, 2006 3:46 pm

This is an awesome article. I learned a lot of great tips and pointers. Thanks for the information!!
The Applied Blogging Workshop » Search Engine Optimization Works like a Charm on June 13th, 2006 8:49 am

[…] Thanks to Darren for the link to Basic SEO tactics for bloggers. That said, it is too basic. […]
» Search Engine Optimization Works like a Charm on Memes.org ~ Meme as Mind Virus, Memes as Cultural Evolution, Memetics as Cultural Revolution on September 12th, 2006 2:18 pm

[…] Thanks to Darren for the link to Basic SEO tactics for bloggers. That said, it is too basic. […]
Search Engine Optimization Works like a Champ < Chris Abraham on December 20th, 2007 8:07 am

[…] to Darren for the link to Basic SEO tactics for bloggers. That said, it is too […]

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