I thought this would be a great thing to pass along. As a blogger, a lot of your SEO is taken care of by your software. However, there are some pretty fundamental things that you can do to help improve your search rankings. I'm not guaranteeing you first page placement on Google, but it can't hurt to follow a few guiding principles.
What It Is
Search Engine Optimization (SEO for those wanting to throw around some techno babble) is the process of making your website, blog or other online entity friendly to the search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. When their spiders (yes, they are really called that because they crawl the web) look at your site, they scoop up your content, organize it and rank it. The ranking method is highly secret, but SEO attempts to make it easier for them to understand a website so they can rank it higher.
Keywords are Key
Keywords are those little words and phrases people search for when they "Google" something. If I search for "Garden Design" in a search engine, the search engines return all the sites where they see that phrase. In SEO-speak, those are keywords.
Don't worry about stuffing your articles full of just the right keyword, but definitely think about the words you use when writing. Your titles should be short, descriptive and contain at least 1 keyword. Then use standard keywords in your articles, like garden, plants, etc.
Now I've read some blogs where they were so focused on using keywords that the blog itself became stilted and uninteresting. Go lightly on the keywords. In fact, if you overstuff your blog, that can actually harm your rankings. So make sure you have them and make sure they are appropriate to the content.
Second, tag your images. Seriously. This is where I was messing up big time. If your software allows for image tags (name, title, etc.) be sure to use them. Blogspot doesn't make it easy, but other software does. You can always learn a little html and add the name="" attribute manually to the img tag. Again, use descriptive text without going overboard. Hover your mouse over the image to see the tag I've given it.
I know it's an extra step, and sometimes you are blogging as you run out the door, but just do it. It's easier to do it now, than to try to remember it later.
Link Me Baby
Every time a site with the same theme as yours links to you, you get a "vote" of confidence in the eyes of the search engines. (So please link to Landscapedia.info on your blog . . . . lol . . . j/k) It means that someone somewhere likes what you are doing, and the search engines love that.
Now you may think that all links are created equal but sadly no. Links from the bad places (link farms and other sites with negative reputations) can actually hurt your standings. So watch your incoming links, and don't be tempted to the dark side of linking. In a future article, I'll touch on Google Anaytics and how to track those incoming links.
If You Love It, Put a Label On It
Those pesky little labels. They do more than just give you one more thing to do. They help organize your blogs into coherent topics. Keep the labels direct, to the point and utilize keywords. There is some debate on whether this helps with rankings, but eh, what the heck. Never hurts to use them anyway (appropriately of course).
Patience Is a Virtue
Sadly, I lack any sort of patience so I will not lecture you on this point. However, be aware that it can take 6 weeks or more for your changes to bear any fruit. Think of it as seeding your blog. It will take time, but you will eventually bear fruit.
Changes I made to Landscapedia in February are just now beginning to show up in the search engines. It's a frustrating process, but at least I can't complain about lack of traffic anymore. Well I can, and quite frequently do, but now I can actually do something about it.
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