SEO And Blogging Tips

Search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming a must for all websites and blogs these days. Hiring an expert to get your site optimized sounds like a good deal if you have right funds. But, if you prefer to do it on your own, here is the list of do it yourself SEO guidelines stretched out for you. Run a checklist for your blog and get your blog SEO optimized without paying a penny.

1. Domain
Domain should be registered for more than 1 year. The longer it is, the better it will be valued by search engine. Similarly, it shows that you are serious in this business and prefer to stay longer. Unlike other new sites that is meant for sale. Try to extend your domain expiry to get the trust from most search engine. Next is the top level domain (TLD) extension type. I would strongly suggesting you to get a .com, .net or .org compared to any other TLD if you are going for global target. Personally, I would prefer a .com compared to any other TLD. Try to avoid free or cheap TLD as it is the heaven for spammers. I am sure you don’t want your new baby site categorized as spammer. The worst case TLD that faces this problem is .co.cc, .cz.cc, and .info which is mainly used by spammer because it is free or cheap.

2. URL Structure
URL structure is one of the important part in on-site SEO. It is good to have important keywords in your URL to be SEO friendly. Compared to numbering type of pages like domainname.com/p13 it is good to have URL name like domainname.com/seo-services. Having keyword in URL section gives certain SEO benefit overall compared to numbering type. It is easy to set this nowadays with WordPress blog where it comes in default setting. You don’t need any special plugin to do that.

3. Site Format (Text Is Best)
Having a image or flash site is totally a bad idea when it comes to SEO. No other way to describe our site better than words. So, instead of having videos, flash or images as main content type of the site, it is wise to concentrate text based. Most search engines uses words as a primary content type to rank higher in their search results compared to flash sites. Get your site full of contents to be SEO friendly.

4. ALT Tags On Images
This is the most neglected part in most sites. By now, you should know the importance of ALT tags in images. It is one of the way search engine robots read images. They still don’t have the technology to render images and identify its niche. We still need to provide details about images used in our site. If you are unable to provide any ALT tags, it is wise to use best keyword as image file name. This is also helpful in SEO.

5. Meta Tags For Each Page
I have noticed many International and multi-billion dollar company’s website and notice similar mistake. There always use same set of meta tags like meta-description, meta-keywords and meta-title for all their website pages. Having unique meta names for each page is vital to let users understand well about your site. Although, meta description is not used in ranking in Google, it is wise to choose appropriate meta keyword for each page. Good meta description increases click-through rate to your site from search engines. In meta keyword section, limit the number of keywords per page to 5-7 numbers of keyword or keyword phrases. Stuffing more than 10 keywords might raise over-optimize or keyword stuffing penalty too. So, keep it short and sweet when it comes to meta tags.

6. Keyword Density
This is another common mistake done by many webmasters. In most cases, healthy keyword density is 2-5%. Personally, I will keep the keyword density at lowest level at 1-2%. The more we use this keywords, the spammy it will look. Writing content to your site with appropritate keyword density will make reader-friendly and search engine friendly too. Limit of keyword uses to make it look more genuine to search engine and readers.

7. Sitemap
This is a must for any site on web today. It is the best way to let search engines know your site pages to crawl and index. XML Sitemap plugin will give you URL in wordpress blog to be used as your sitemap. Usually, it will be sitename.com/sitemap.xml. You need to submit this to Google Webmaster to let Google know your site and it’s pages to crawl. Indexing part is still at Google’s speed. They will take time to study your site and not all your pages in sitemap can get listed in Google search. They do refine pages and run through many processes to index certain pages from our site.

8. Find Hidden Text
Never use any hidden text in your site. If your site’s background color is white, then using white font will make your site hiding texts. Texts in white may appear to search engines but not the visitors. It is against most webmaster’s guidelines to show different contents to users and search engines. Show same content to both users and search engines. Do not hide any texts as it may lead to heavy penalty which may remove your site entirely from their search engines.

9. Robot.txt File
This is also another file that is recommended by search engines. Here you can allow and disallow pages where search engine to crawl or not to crawl. If you are not familiar using this file, I suggest you to get some advice from experts from webmaster forums or etc.

10. www or without www
Setting your preferred domain name with or without www from the beginning is important. Take notice that search engine like Google sees sites with www and without www as two different site. Although, you will still able to get your site from browser typing site name without www for sites with www, these two sites will value differently when it comes to backlink calculation. Doing a permanent redirect from www to domainname.com or domainname.com to www.domainname.com is important. If you ask, which is better, I would say none. It is the same. Just choose your prefered domain and do a permanent redirect. You can also choose your preferred domain from Google webmaster. Usually, most webmasters don’t realize that they lose significant amount of backlink value from this simple mistake. We have no control over how people gives backlink to us. They might use www or without www. To get full benefit from either type of linking, a permanent 301 redirection is a must.

12. Canonical Links
Having similar page but different URL will make your site look bad. The same content that have different page URL might trigger content duplicate issue. But, there are cases that we need to use different URL for the same content. In this case, you can use canonical URL to represent similar content without raising duplicate contents or pressuring search engines to process duplicate contents and truncate similar content files from their search listings. Having proper canonical URL arrange will make your site even more SEO friendly.

13. Interlinking
It is advisable to give dofollow link for all our internal pages to help it get more page rank and easy indexing. In any new article you post on your blog or website, if you have keywords that are relevant to your older post, give a link to older post in your new post. This will also help increase page rank spread to internal pages while increase SERP ranking in search engine. Do not use nofollow link to any of your internal pages.

14. Control Outgoing Links
It is advisable not to have more than 100 outgoing links per page to retain high quality of a page. The lower number of outgoing links will increase the quality of our blog page. Plus, most advertisers will also prefer to have low number of competition. Even if you are not advertising, you don’t want your core product or internal pages to have higher competition with list of blogrolls or featured links. Make use of SEO tools together with browsers like Chrome or Firefox to help you understand better your site. Giving a link from your site should be taken seriously. For example, if site A is considered as bad neighborhood by Google; if your website or blog links to site A, then your site will most probably get a penalty from Google. Do not link to bad neighborhood sites as well.

15. Backlinks
The more backlinks we have the better we look in search engine. However, it is not wise to increase our backlinks at one go. It may trigger spam alert and might get us heavy penalty that can completely remove our site from search engine listings. Remember, backlinks are sensitive in search engine’s eye. Earn it moderately from only relevant pages that do not acquire links from any bad neighborhoods. Try to get quality backlinks on pages that have low number of outgoing links and do not link to any other bad neighborhood sites. There are many backlink checker tools available free online. Run some analysis on your site.

There you go with 15 do it yourself SEO tips for your website or blog. This will be helpful in creating a SEO friendly website or blog without hiring an expert to do it for you.

Related posts:

1. 5 Killer Content Creation Guidelines
2. 4 Multi User Blogging Guidelines