Keeping the Search Engines Happy
June 18th 2006 01:03
Search Engines generate 70% of the traffic of most successful blogs and readers who arrive at your blog from a Search Engine are 10 times more likely to click on an ad.
This is probably the most well kept secret of successful bloggers who as well as being good writers also know how to write posts which are more likely to rank highly in search engine results. All of the top 20 Orble blogs get the majority of their new readers through someone clicking on a search result at one of the big three search engines.
The Big Three
The traffic stats for the OnlineGames blog shows traffic coming from Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search
Here are a few tips for keeping the Search Engines happy:
Have patience. You will most likely not get any search engine traffic for the first two weeks. Then it will start with one or two referrals every day gradually building up over a month to 10 or 20 and then going up from there hopefully into the hundreds when your blog is around 3 months old. The slow start is due to the fact that search engines do not trust new websites as well as the fact that there is not much material on a new blog for a search engine to refer traffic to.
Post regularly. Search engines love websites which have regularly updated fresh content. Once per weekday at the very least. The importance of this point cannot be overstated. All of the top 20 Orble blogs have a new post at least once per weekday.
Choose good post titles. The title of the post should contain keywords which describe what the post is about. A post about the XBox gaming system should be entitled something like "XBox review" and not "A cool gaming system". A review of "Tony's Pizzeria" should definitely contain the words "Tony's" and "Pizzeria" somewhere in the title. A post about the Atkins diet should be called something like "The Atkins Diet" and not "An easy way to lose weight".
It is also very important to use the Short Title feature. This way you can have interesting titles for your posts and still let the search engines know exactly what your post is about.
Keywords. It also helps to have the relevant keywords in the body of your post. Don't over do it though (the relevant keyword density should not go over 7%) and don't sacrifice the readability of your writing.
Give your images a title. Images are just decoration for your posts right? Wrong! Millions of people search for images every day and the only way a search engine can understand what an image is depicting is from the title you give it (that's the title, not the caption). A couple of Orble blogs get more than half of their search engine traffic from image searches so always remember to give your images a title that describes in as few words as possible what is in the image. It only takes about 5 seconds and is worth the effort.
Links. If you have friends with webpages get them to link to your blog and if possible your Pillar Articles. Search engines rank highly websites which have lots of "inbound" links from other websites.
Post length. A post should be at least 150 (or even better 250) words long if you want it to attract search engine traffic. It's OK to create posts which are shorter if appropriate to your blog, just don't expect the search engines to rank them highly.
Choose the right subject. Go the the webpage http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type in the main keywords (one at a time) associated with your blog. You will get a list of the most popular related topics people are typing into the Search Engines. If appropriate create posts with the same title.
For example, the main keyword for the blog www.photographytips.com.au is "photography". After inputing this into the keyword search (see the above URL) we get some great suggestions for post topics:
52293 digital photography
37342 nude photography
27662 wedding photography
25205 stock photography
19684 product photography
15400 aerial photography
15239 photography lab
14860 erotic photography
14243 black and white photography
12228 art photography
11771 glamour photography
11447 college photography
9378 photography class
9246 photography studio
7770 photography equipment
7187 child photography
6577 fine art photography
6533 photography school
6453 family photography
5789 photography contest
The number on the left is the number of people who used Yahoo to search for those keywords during the previous month. Most of these topics would suit a post on photographytips.com.au and should attract a large amount of Search Engine traffic. Other suitable keywords for photographytips.com.au that you could try would be "camera", "photo", "photograph", "photgrapher", "film" etc.
The more people who search for a given keyword the more traffic you will potentially receive to a well crafted post on that subject. However there is also usually more competition for the most popular keywords so you are sometimes better off going for the less popular ones, especially if your blog is new. As your blog becomes more established you can then try for some of the more popular competitive keywords. It also helps to write longer posts for the more competitive keywords as the Search Engines like webpages with lots of text on them. Adding a couple of images to your post which have titles related to the keyword you are targeting will also help.
You can also take topics suggested by Overture and re-enter them into the "Keyword Selector Tool" to find more niche topics to write about.
Making the Search Engines mad.
Some things can get you banned from the Search Engines so don't do them!
- Link Swapping schemes.
- Submitting your domain to 1000 search engines at once schemes.
- Anything else that seems even slightly shady.
- If in doubt ask first!
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Comment by Jessicca
Learning Something Everyday
Malaysia Found
I am kind of lost on the "Making the Search Engines mad" section...
Comment by Eric
Mal Gadget
Good links are the ones that you don't ask for, but receive because you put effort into your work. The search engines are getting smarter and smarter by the day and they WILL move you off the first page of results if your messing around with silly linking schemes.
Comment by Jessicca
Learning Something Everyday
Malaysia Found
Comment by Eric
Mal Gadget
Perhaps this will help.
http://www.seogoggles.com/are-link-exchanges-good-or-bad/
-Eric
Comment by PokerPro
See what I mean here It is the last result.