Understanding Basic SEO
Posted by Nick Aviles on September 16, 2009
For the most part, bloggers fundamentally rely on organic search engine listings to receive traffic to the blog. However, in order to get above your competitor’s websites, you need to do what is called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). Search engine optimization is nothing other than optimizing your site in order to improve your rankings on organic SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). There are many parts of search engine optimization, and I’m going to cover the most important aspects.
Before I start getting into all the aspects of search engine optimization, please remember that you are not writing content for search engines. If you’re going to over optimize your content, people will not want to ever come back to your website. You have to find a balance between writing valuable content for people interested in your niche, and at the same time optimizing your site for organic SERPs.
Page Title – When creating your niche blogs, choosing the right page title is extremely important. Google takes your page title into consideration, as well as all the other SEO aspects. Try to keep your title simple, to the point, and relative to what people might be searching for. When writing blog posts, you will have the ability to modify your page title (with the help of a plugin that I’ll talk about later). Try to keep those titles as specific as possible. For example, if you’re writing a post about apples, titling your page “The importance of eating apples” will probably be more useful than “Eating fruits”. Over time, you will learn how to create appealing titles for both search engines and people.
Meta Description – Meta description is a piece of code inside a page that is only written for search engines to describe what the page is about. Try to place the keywords you’re trying to rank for inside the Meta description, as the search engines will rank your site higher.
Meta Keywords – Meta keywords aren’t as important as Meta description, and I would say it’s the least important factor when it comes to SEO. For Meta keywords, try to include single words or 2 word phrases that relate to your posts, separating by commas. As I said, search engines will not think too much of Meta keywords, and they’re not so vitally important.
Keyword Density – Even though some people may not agree on this, but in my personal experience, keyword density matters a lot. For example, if you’re writing a post about “Abyssinian kittens”, and you want to rank for the term “Abyssinian kittens”, then you would need to repeat the term inside your text a decent number of times. Make sure you’re not abusing this, because your text will not make any sense. Try to keep your density around 3-5%. To check your keyword density, use the Keyword Density Checker tool.
Domain Age – An often overlooked part about search engine optimization, and probably one of the most important factors. New domains will usually rank much less than older domains. Does that mean that your domain can’t ever outrank an older domain? Of course not, it can be done with proper SEO and backlinks. However, older domains do have an advantage just because they are older. To check domain ages, use the Domain Age Checker tool.
Domain Name – When you’re choosing a domain name, you have to understand the importance of including your major keywords inside your domain name. Google will prioritize your niche blog above others just for the mere fact that you have more relative keywords inside your domain name. I will go through this in details later on.
Sitemap – Sitemaps are vital for good search engine optimization, but luckily for you, you won’t need to create sitemaps. There are plugins that will automatically generate sitemaps. However, you still need to know that sitemaps are important so Google can crawl all of your pages easier.
Backlinks – This is by far the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Backlinks, also referred to as inlinks, are simply links that point to your website. Every page has PR (PageRank), and the higher the PR the site that’s pointing to yours has the more boosts it will give you. Google takes into consideration many aspects such as relevancy of the sites linking to you, how many links do those sites link to (the more links the page links to, the less boost you will get) and whether or not that link has rel=“nofollow”. For example, if you’re pointing to the site such as <a href= “http://www.nickaviles.com” rel=“nofollow”>Make Money Online</a>, the website will not get a PageRank boost from that link. It will count towards backlinks count, but it will not boost the site. There will be a whole section devoted to teaching how to build backlinks. This is just a rough overview.
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Tell me what you think about the post, I don't bite!
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Peace!
Great post. I totally agree with you.