Search Enigine Optimization 101 for New Bloggers

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is undoubtedly a tricky area. I’ve come to find that new bloggers in general have no idea what this is or how to even go about it doing it. I’ve even had old clients ask ‘Why would a big search engine visit my site?’ He was absolutely clueless.

Search engines will crawl your site constantly throughout the day in order to determine your search engine ranking for specific search queries. The biggest SEO challenge that all bloggers face is striking a balance between writing for a higher search listing and writing for your readers.

What the heck is SEO anyway?

In short, SEO is all about ranking higher for keywords in located in your text in search engine rankings. Whenever you visit Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other major search engine, you are entering keywords as your query and the search engine returns the most relevant links that closely match what you’re looking for. It is your ultimate goal as a blogger to rank as high as you possibly can for the keywords describing the overall theme of your site. If you’re blogging about GPS systems, you want your site to be in the first position when someone types ‘GPS Reviews’ into Google. Search Engine Optimization helps you achieve this.

Keywords for Dummies

I mentioned earlier that you need to rank high for specific keywords. If you don’t know what keywords are, this will probably be a good place to start learning. A keyword, or a keyword phrase, accurately describes both what your blog is about and the current article that you are writing. For example, some keyword phrases to best describe this website would be: ‘start a blog’ ‘make money with a blog’ or ‘blogging for beginners.’ Now, keywords to describe this article would be ‘Search Engine Optimization for Beginners’ ‘SEO Help’ and ‘SEO Tools for WordPress.’ All of these accurately describe this articles content. Catch my drift?

Now, you could sit down and write out a list of all the keywords that you think might accurately describe your content and on top of that, you won’t even be exactly sure if these keywords are even searched for on a daily basis.

OR

You can use any number of keyword suggestion tools to find the search volume of certain terms, advertising competition, and other suggestions for keyword phrases through the use of a number of SEO tools and have a website do all of the work for you.

I think the answer is pretty clear and just in case you didn’t catch that, these websites are: Google’s Keyword Sandbox, iWebTool’s Keyword Suggestions, Wordtracker’s Free Keywords, and SEOBook’s Free Keyword Tool. All of these are excellent tools in coming up with keywords and I recommend using at least two or three to provide the most accurate list of search results.

WordPress and SEO

At this point, you should have done your research and came up with a list of keywords you can use. All of these should be relevant to your blog as using anything else would just be a waste of time and can penalize your search ranking and even get your entire domain banned from the search engine all together. So, don’t try using the keywords ‘make money’ to describe your Christmas Tree blog. You can get caught and suffer the consequences.

In order to put these keywords to good use, you’re going to need to install the All in one SEO Pack WordPress plugin. This plugin will allow you to set the proper title, descriptive text, and keywords for both your blog as a whole and each individual post. It does this by creating an extra set of fields in the post edit window of your blog’s administration panel. The following is an example of the All in One SEO Pack at work on this post:

The All in One SEO Pack is a must have for every WordPress blog out there. It will do all of the hard work for you and you’ll be left with a better search ranking and a little more time on your hands. Click here to learn more about this plugin.

After you sue the keywords you found above to describe the title and description of your blog and your post, be sure to go back and add these keywords to your text as well. Physically insert these keywords into parts of your post. Just be sure not to disrupt the flow or the result could be absolutely SEO GUIDE HELP FOR NEWBIES horrendous.

Experiment and Study

SEO is a challenge for everyone. Even the best search engine optimizers out there still struggle with consistently maintaining high rankings on their websites. It’s unlikely that you’ll start seeing high rankings from the start, but as you continue blogging and experiment a little more, you’ll come to get the hang of it a little better.

Always remember to write your posts first, do your keyword research, then go back and add relevant keyword phrases to your titles and your text in order to receive better rankings.