Although my blog is nearing to break in to alexa top 100k web sites, I am still not getting considerable traffic from Google and other search engines. Average organic traffic is around 8% and they are coming from keywords I never targeted for.
I do not have time to write everyday to get social media attention. Desperate for some Google love, I searched all over Internet to get some solid tips on SEO. After going through dozens of articles on “blog SEO” and ” wordpress SEO“, I did the following changes in my blog.
1. I changed my blog Title.
Title is the phrase you see in the top of your browser when you open a web page. My title used to be ” Turning cats into lions. Your success starts here.” Although it is a catchy title it has nothing to do with my targeted key words. So I changed it to a new one which includes few of my targeted keywords. Now it says “Money making ideas and opportunities to help you get started“.
2. I made the post titles to be H1 tags.
Any SEO expert will say how important it is to use H1 tags in your titles. By default it was H2. So I changed it to H1 with the help of my friend Nadeesha at rockfuse dot com. When I changed it to H1 initially it gave me a very ugly looking title.
To change that ugly H1 layout, go to your style sheet and find something like this,
{style type=”text/css”>
[!--
H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }
-->
Change the properties to give it the look you always wanted.
3. Bold keywords.
In individual posts, I made sure to include a keyword in the first few sentences and I made it bold. I did repeat the keywords 3-4 times throughout the entire post and also made them bold. And I did the same thing towards the end of the post.
4. Optimized images and alt tags.
I normally tend to write long posts. I don't write just for the sake of publishing another new post and increase my posting frequency. So I always use few images in my posts to give readers a break.
See this post about drop shipping for an example. I started renaming these images to keywords I am targeting for. And I also started using the "alt tag" to it's maximum potential. These little things are important in blog SEO. Google still cannot read images. So when they come across an image they look at the image name and the alt name. So these days, I am going back to old posts and doing these necessary changes.
[ad#ad-16]5. Using keyword anchor texts in my Internal links.
As bloggers, we tend to do lot of internal linking. They might be in the form of related posts or in the side bar or they might be links within the posts. When linking I started using keywords in Anchor texts.
For example, take a look at the previous paragraph. When I linked to a previous post without just using the “click here” phrase I used “drop shipping” as the anchor text. I learned that these all small tweaks add up in the final equation when it comes to best blog SEO practices.
6. I registered my domain for a lengthy period.
Google itself has mentioned that they are looking to the domain registration length when they are ranking web sites. There are too many web sites these days. Lot of them die within the first few months. If you register your domain for a lengthy period It gives an indication to Google that you are here for stay. Besides, it does not cost your more than $10 a year.
7. Solved the duplicate content issue in word press.
By default , word press and many other blogging platforms create dozens of different URL’s for the same content. Google will consider this as spamming, in order to avoid this problem use a robots text like this. It will not solve all your duplicate content issues but can consider as a good remedy.
This is what I have done in past few weeks and it has already started giving me results. Organic traffic has increased from just 8 % to 10.5% in this short time. I am expecting much better results once I get some more back links to my web site.
I have not mentioned any SEO techniques used out side the blog. These all are internal SEO attempts. I am sure I have missed many important points. You are welcome to share your ideas and enlighten us on the SEO work you have done in your site.
For more great articles on “blog SEO” and “wordpress SEO” please visit,
problogger
copyblogger
rockfuse
And also I found a great video on “blog seo” from mindvalleylabs.com, the only problem in this video is, they use overture to find keywords. Since it is no longer in use, you can use Google adwords keyword tool for the same purpose. This video is great. It explains how they come to the Google top ten results 10/10 times. Enjoy, And do not hesitate to share your knowledge on blog / wordpress SEO here.
Do not forget to read,
Are you making enough money from your blog?
Can you still make money from adsense?
hi,
SEO experts say that blogs are friendly to search engines by design – they are meant to always contain new content that are abundantly interlinked. This certainly explains why there are some very successful blogs that land on the first page of search engine results (for commonly searched terms) without even trying.
Hi, I do not have a blog. I do have a web site though. Will these tweaks work for my web site?
ya they will work for most of the websites , if I were to start my blog from the beginning I would have definitely chosen another domain name , RumblingLankan doesn’t exactly say what the blog is about :( , I guess money making ideas is better that turning cats into lions :)
@ Manthree,
Most of these methods are universal for any web site.
@ Nishadha,
Me too. This domain was supposed to be for my Hosting web site for Sri Lankans.. I installed a wordpress script just as a test. Uploaded a theme just for fun. Wrote the first post just to see the layout. But now , I am having some serious fun.
Lots of good info here. I am going to check some of my posts with your suggestions in mind and do some tinkering. Thanks.
If only 8% of your traffic is organic traffic, how in the world are you cracking the 100K barrier on Alexa?
About 85% of my traffic is organic google search traffic. Send me an email as my website and I’ll tell you how.
@ adwords,
Well at this moment of speaking my alexa rank is 109,000. I guess social media love me a lot. And I started getting good yahoo traffic today. Hope it will continue…
I have found that my Google traffic is always higher when my overall traffic is up. It works in reverse too as well. When my traffic starts to die down, I get less hits from Google.
It’s kind of like building a fire. You have to constantly put new wood on the fire and if you want a bonfire, you need a whole lot of great firewood, or in this case, great content.
Thanks for the tips!
The picture you used is worth 1000 word’s. It represents the agony of a newbie web masters. I am a photographer my self. I am planning to launch my own web blog. This information will be very helpful for me. Thank you for a great effort.
After seeing this blog and nice tips given, I am inspired to run a blog. I love Sri Lankan Tele Drams and TV shows. Will there be a good market for that. How can I check it before starting? Any help is appreciated.
@ Sampath,
Well it has been a good niche in other countries. There is no reason for you to fail here. Just give it a go. You wouldn’t know if you don’t try, Would you?
These are some interesting thoughts and while I have not tried all of them I have tried a few of them.
I’m going to give some more a try and we’ll see what happens, because I am trying very desperately to get some google love as well.
Thanks you inspired me to finally fix my robots.txt file! :)
Oh man.. I did not know that you are from sri lanka. I have enjoyed most of your old articles but only read the “about me” page today. I am so proud about you. Keep it up. We all are with you.
Great tips that works. I’ve used some of them, and like you pointed out they do make a lot of difference. Nice post.
@ Arnold- Sometimes we are too lazy to do simple things. I also added it last week.
@ Kalindu- Thank you for the nice words. Much appreciated.
@ N.E – I hope I will get better results in the future. :-)
This is interesting. I guess we all are on the lookout for traffic. Definitely search driven traffic is excellent if you can get it. I thought the size of font should not make any difference?
What is your google page rank? Doesnt a higher page ranked article always appear higher even if you do all these things?
great going you are just about to break into 100K on Alexa
Hi Ivs, It is not the size of the font that matters. It is the properties of that font matters. ( Like bold texts.) BTW does anyone think I should increase the size of my fonts? Are they too small? I am looking forward to get a feedback on this one. Thank you in advance.
Hi Eranda,
These 2 WordPress plugins would help your leaders to establish some of your opinions in their web sites with minimum effort.
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-friendly-images
http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/
Hi,
Excellent article, There are a lot of other blogs which explain SEO strategies and principals but I wonder if they know who their readers are? In general those instructions are hard to understand, but yours are very clear and easier to implement too. Thank you so much and best of luck!!
Thanks Yohan.
It is been a while since I wrote this post and I am experiencing some remarkable changes in my Google Traffic. Not only Google, even yahoo has been kind for me. I rank high in yahoo for a keyword which get 27,000 monthly searches. And that is the key word I targeted in all my efforts. I am really happy about how it turned out.
I can guarantee that these things will definitely work.
You are doing good work improving your SEO. Using keyword anchor texts in internal links is effective. It is good to Bold words and improving the headers. Thanks for sharing this info.
[...] on social media traffic early. You can read all about the changes I have done from my “blog seo” [...]
I confirm as a SEO experts that blogs are friendly to search engines. you’re cracking the 100K barrier on Alexa!!! Congratulation :)
Another great post that I will definitely take into consideration. Also, the video is extremely helpful. The only question I have is when you do the “ALT” tags for pictures, what should be written in it? Keywords? Phrases? Description?
Firstly the picture in your article attracts alot of attention . . . I think first of all that this is one way to distract a visitor to your site from leaving! Thanks for the idea here. Overall, I will keep all the tips you mentioned here, in very careful consideration, also.
One other thing I realized, is website optimization. For some or the other reason, a great optimized website seems to outrank those that have more (and more quality) backlinks! This I have noticed from a website that is absolutely new. It has PR0, it has only 10 links (only one PR6 backlink for Ezine articles), the others are PR0,PR1 and PR2. But it shows at #6 now for my keyword, earlier it was on the second page of Google. It actually moves up a few places, every 3rd day, and guess what? Backlinks within Yahoo! shows 10, but within Google it is 0! I can only scratch my head from the secrets here on HOW specifically it is being ranked up and for WHAT for . . .
@cashgifting,
I am having the same experience with my other site sft..it has virtually no back links expect few from here and it ranks in the first page for some of the competitive forex key words. All I did was optimizing to the best of my knowledge.
Hi,
I will try it in my website … let me check it will work or not in all the way
Didn’t know you also read Mindvalleylabs.com
I read it too. And I can say they are one of the best in Internet Marketing.
I searched all over Internet to get some solid tips on SEO. I changed it to a new one which includes few of my targeted keywords.
[...] I had a big problem when I started this blog. I did not know how to optimize my blog to get search engine’s much needed love towards me. I remember I wrote a post on October 31 st 2008 with the title, “My Desperate Attempts To Get Some Google Love“. [...]
Great post and nice edits to your blog.. I am sure that gave you better results. Check out my blog also on Web Traffic. It has all free tips and resources for getting more web traffic. Helps to get more blog visitors or people to your website.
Dealz
http://yougetfreetraffic.blogspot.com/
Free top web traffic tips and resources
[...] I could get listed in Google within 2 days and could get in to the first page within a week thanks to do follow blogs and smart “on page optimization“. [...]
I just started my Blog too and i really need some love from Google. Why do you make your keywords bold?
Post a Comment