If you’re a blogger that has a goal of reaching a large audience then learning about search engine optimization or SEO is a must.
The reasons for wanting to reach a large audience may vary from blogger to blogger. No doubt one of the most popular, is to increase your traffic and increase your profits.
Some bloggers are promoting a cause, so they’re wanting to increase traffic to get their message out to a larger number of people. While others are counting on high blog traffic to generate higher revenue.
Whatever the reason may be, the answer is optimizing your blog for search engines.
Do Search Engine Rankings Really Matter?
Yes, search engine rankings are directly responsible for increasing traffic to your blog. Many online users rely on search engines to provide information on a specific topic.
Therefore, websites that appear on the first page of search results have a higher probability of users visiting than those on subsequent pages.
Most internet users aren’t likely to search through more than the first couple pages of results when looking for information on a specific subject.
High search engine rankings are like free advertisement for your blog or site. Website users often follow popular search engine recommendations when it comes to finding useful information online.
Search engines use crawlers or robots to bring back information on various sites. They crawl each website and determine what the site is about and add data to its index.
The search engines use complicated algorithms to appraise the data collected from the various websites and from that they determine what their ranking will be for specific search terms.
Internet users trust the search engine evaluations of the websites and know that will direct them to the best available sites for the keywords that are being searched.
SEO for Your Blog
Using relevant keywords is the most popular way to optimize your site or blog for search engines. A common tactic used applying specific keyword densities in your blog content.
For a free keyword research tool visit thehoth.com.
Blog owners may disagree over the optimal density of keyword usage but normally the agreed percentage runs at 2-3%.
Another SEO tip is placing relevant keywords into the website’s code. This would include the title tags and META tags. When search engines evaluate a website they take into consideration the prominence of where the keywords are placed.
So, where the keywords first appear plays a role in the search engine consideration.
Placing keywords at the start of the website content is useful but search engines view the code first. By placing keywords before the blog’s body the search engine robots come across it first.
Bloggers can also increase their rankings by creating backlinks to their blogs. One way you can do this is to find other websites that will place a link to your blog on their site.
Search engines take into account the number of links to a website into their algorithm for rankings.
They view it as a way of validating or vouching for another website. You can approach other sites with the agreement of a return link on your site to theirs.
This is called reciprocal linking but may not be as highly valued as a link that is not reciprocated.
Keep in mind that if the website that links to your blog doesn’t rank well, then the backlink will not make much of a ranking improvement for you.
For more great tips on how to create a cash flow from your blog, see our previous post,
How Blogging Can Bring in the Big Bucks.