Increasing Your Blog Traffic – Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Content is a primary thing to achieve when it comes to writing blog posts however it doesn’t follow that this is the only thing a blogger should concentrate on. Quality SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is just as important to content, otherwise the blog remains a well-kept secret — all content and very few visitors, which is not good.

To avoid being below the search engine rankings, here are some SEO tips that will come in handy in turning that ordinary blog into a highly trafficked site.

Place your Keywords Strategically

Remember that search engines like Google and Yahoo send out automated web crawlers or “spiders” to categorize and rank published web sites and blogs in the Internet, these spiders do this be searching keywords and categorizing them to their corresponding fields. Make sure to follow the following best practices to achieve pleasing results:

- The title () tag of the website is always crawled and analyzed by search engine spiders. To acquire a good ranking, make sure to implement your keywords on the title tag.

- The heading () tags are also crawled. This means keywords should be integrated in each of the titles as much as possible.

- Images are usually ignored by spiders, but keywords positioned as textual descriptions in the tags of images are not. So if your site or blogs utilizes much media, remember to insert your keywords strategically.

- Search engine spiders scan keywords in inbound or outbound links to blog sites. For inbound links from other websites to yours’; use keywords as part of the anchor text (the clickable text in a link). For outbound links on your blog to others’; make sure that your URL link contains your keywords.

- Achieving the right number of keywords to preserve keyword density is very important. Basically, the blogger has direct control over this metric, by writing blog posts with around 3% of keyword density. More than that could appear annoying and can be seen as somewhat spamming. However, less than 7% may cause the spiders to miss keywords for the blog.

- Search engine spiders also consider synonyms when scanning. You’re free to include synonyms to limit keyword monotony in blog posts, this way, you also optimize your web site.

Linking for Ranking

Establishing quality links in the blog can be very useful, particularly incoming links from sites with similarities. Similar sites technically means websites that are your niche competitors and getting competitor sites to linking your blog is considered a major vote that increases the blog’s status in your niche, this also increases your rankings in the search engines.

Long-lasting inbound links are very much advisable. Aging links are favored by search engines; this is basically interpreted as an endorsement by the linking website and functions as a proof of organic link-building.

On the other hand, broken links must be avoided at all cost, because search engines demote blog ranking at the confirmation of non-existent sites.

Search Engine Algorithms

Search engines index and rank websites in accordance to their algorithms, although most SEO tips focus on keywords and link building because these are common in search engines. Google, however, makes use sitemaps to index blogs and websites. The use of the robots.txt file is also another method that search engines use to ignore or index a site. Use this file carefully to ban or un-ban certain portions of your site from the search engine rankings.