7 SEO Tips for Optimizing Your Blog and Increasing Organic Traffic

Posted on November 22, 2007 - Filed Under Blog Tips

The statistics for my blog is currently unbalanced, with 80% of my traffic coming from referred sites, 4% direct traffic and 6% search traffic. Looking to increase SEO traffic to balance out the figures a little, I have gathered a few tips from various sources for improving my organic search results.

1. Submit your blog to DMOZ.
DMOZ is a site that is part of the Open Directory Project where human editors review thousands of sites that are submitted each day for inclusion in search engines like Google. The benefit of submitting your site to DMOZ is that you can specify the category or niche that you want your blog to be indexed in, and you can see a list of competitive indexed sites that belong to the same niche or category. If you are a beginning blogger who is trying to decide which niche you want to target, DMOZ is a useful place to start. Remember - the less popular the niche, the chances of your keywords bringing you to the front page and top listing is a lot higher than a category where thousands of sites are plying the same keywords for top ranking in an organic search. Your strategy will differ greatly and your challenge will be finding ways to create awareness for your niche rather than fighting for top position on a Google search for a specific keyword(s).

2. Submit Your Blog to Vertical Search Engines. This is not exactly an SEO tip, but is particularly important for sites that are selling products that want to be found by a search engine. Google is great for broad organic searches where information documents are served. However, if you are searching for where you can buy a particular product online, it can be frustrating. For example, if you want to save yourself a trip to the pharmacy and order aspirin online, a Google search for aspirin gives you wikipedia information and the history of aspirin, how it works, dosage, etc. A search at thefind.com and Lasso.com.au however, will give you catalog pages of all the aspirin products there are, the URL of the ordering page, and the price of the product. So if you are an ecommerce merchant, you will want to make sure that your products are found there. A list of vertical search engines can be found at read/Write dot com.

A couple of interesting vertical search sites are Plugged and Retrevo. Plugged is a video podcast advertising solutions site while Retrevo is a search engine targetted specifically for gadgets and electronic products.

3. Optimize Your Blog Title. What this means is simply that you include the top 1 or 2 keywords descriptive of your blog into its title. Shorter titles are more effective for SEO searches, so it is not a good idea to try to squeeze in as many keywords into your blog title as possible. If you are using Wordpress, you will enter your blog title under “options” in the administrative panel.

4. Optimize Your Post Titles. By optimizing your post titles, you are increasing your chances of getting your page indexed by Google. DMOZ allows you to get the front page of your blog indexed via site submission. However, if you try to submit all the pages in your site for inclusion in search engines, you take the risk of being blacklisted. Instead, work at getting individual post pages indexed by Google via target keywords. To do this, target 1 or 2 keywords in your post that you want Google to index it by, and work that into both the title and content of the post. Wordpress plugins designed for optimizing your post titles are the Optimal Title Plugin and SEO Title Plugin.

5. Install the Wordpress SEO pack. This nifty Wordpress plugin not only lets you customize your home page title, description and meta keywords (instead of editing it manually on your index page template), it also allows you to customize your post, category, archive, tag, search, description and even 404 title formats. Most importantly, you can modify and insert post titles, description and keywords into each entry for maximum search engine optimization for each post.

6. Optimize Your Page. As the Google bot pays attention to <h1> header tags, edit your Wordpress template to use the <h1> tag for your post title and modify its look in the CSS stylesheet if necessary. Make it a point to target your top 2 keywords in your post title that will appear within the <h1> tag, and make sure that you populate the same keywords in the first paragraph and subheadings of your article. While these are the semantics of SEO optimization, don’t forget that you are writing for your audience and not for search engines. However, if your article is very specific and focused, you will find that embedding keywords into your titles, subheadings and content comes naturally. One note of caution is not to use too many header tags for your articles as this will cause the Google bot to classify your page as being a “spam”.

7. Optimize Your Images. It is typical to come across sites which name their images “1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, etc.” or directly using the names assigned by their camera such as “DSC100″ or “IMG201″. The Google bot also pays attention to <img> tags, so maximize your opportunity to insert keywords into your image file names. Using image file names to hold keywords also has the added advantage of not interfering with the flow and readability of your content.

While these are fairly basic tips, they are important in getting you geared toward achieving your goals for more organic search traffic. The more highly optimized your posts are, the more effective you will be at indexing your page / post for a specific target keyword. And it is your ranking for these keywords that will send advertisers knocking on your doors.

Do you have other SEO tips that has been effective in driving traffic to your blog?

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Comments

61 Responses to “7 SEO Tips for Optimizing Your Blog and Increasing Organic Traffic”

Mark on November 22nd, 2007 8:59 am

Ivy ~ very nice post.

I have been wondering about vertical search engines lately and you have sent me in the right direction with the links that you provide.

Ivy on November 22nd, 2007 3:08 pm

Glad you found the information useful Mark! I personally think the Plugged site is interesting and will be exploring it for a future post.

Search Engine Optimization Direct » 7 SEO Tips for Optimizing Your Blog and Increasing Organic Traffic on January 8th, 2008 3:15 pm

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