Promote Your Blog: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Keywords

It’s been a while since I’ve done a piece on blog marketing and promotion, although the topic has gotten a lot of buzz (see: How To Market Your Blog Part One, How To Market Your Blog Part Two, and How To Market Your Blog Part Three). Whether you’re blogging for extra cash or just want to get your writing out to the masses, search engines are a crucial means to get more traffic from people who are looking for exactly what you’ve blogged about.

I’m assuming you have some sort of stats meter reporting who’s reading your site? Maybe not who, but where they’re coming from. I use Site Meter and Google Analytics. I highly recommend Google Analytics because it’s good for just that – analyzing your traffic. It really picks things apart and I love it. For this mini tutorial you’ll need a meter that ranks your highest keyword referrals from search engine hits. I will pull this info from Google Analytics.

These keywords have sent Frappelattes the most hits in the past six months:

1. best drugstore makeup
2. high rise pants
3. how to look good in pictures

It’s no wonder that isolated posts/pages on my website like this and this have gotten so many hits on their own. People are searching for the exact topics I’ve written about (blog for your reader base as well as for upcoming trends!) then perhaps bookmarking the post to revisit again and again. This is what we want.

So, knowing that these keywords are sending me the most hits, what do I do next? I write MORE posts regarding drugstore makeup – reviews, tutorials, whathaveyou – keep blogging about new fashion trends, and undoubtedly write more content about looking good in photos. I’m sure the keyword “how to look good in pictures” would be higher on the list if the post hadn’t have been written only two weeks ago. Who doesn’t want to know how to work their angles in photos?

In addition to giving people more of what they’re looking for, you want them to come back. Therefore, use graphics or plugins to encourage people to bookmark your post, or Stumble it, or Digg it… better yet, have them subscribe to your RSS feed.

However, be sure to incorporate some or all of the following things to optimize your site and achieve higher Google rankings (important!):

• Use tags. WordPress 2.3 and later has a tags feature under your Post options. Use this! The tags for each post are added to the meta keywords within the header tag of the pages on your site, making it easier to people to find your site via Google and other search engines.
• Use keyword-rich wording. As you’re writing your post, get in the habit of using wording and terms that people are likely to type into a search box. For instance, instead of naming a post “My Favorite Drugstore Makeup” I named it “Best Drugstore Makeup.”
• Re-optimize your posts. Taking search keywords that people used to find your website, go back into those posts and add those search keywords as tags. This will drive even more relevant search hits to your site.
• Correct your permalinks. Be sure that your posts are being saved /this-way instead of /?=249 or some other unidentifiable format. In WordPress this can be corrected by going into Options » Permalinks. Choose option “Date and name based” if you want to display the date as well in your permalinks, or select “Custom, specify below” and type /%postname%/ to display only the post name.