An Approach to SEO, for Bloggers

If you want to build a large audience by driving a lot of free traffic to your blog, there is probably no way around learning at least the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Believe me, if you master the following concepts, your blog will be on its way to success. You will be able to capture the attention of potential readers much more efficiently than most of your competitors. You will deliver the information that people are searching for, and since you are fulfilling their expectations you will in return be able to build a long-term relationship with your readers.

Dealing with all the technical concepts of SEO isn’t necessary. I will show what shortcuts to take and how to wrap your mind around complicated, technical SEO issues and theories. Before I teach you my “simple” approach to this subject, let me sum up what the key elements of SEO are and from where SEO has evolved.

A Brief History of SEO

In the early days of search engines, webmasters quickly discovered that it was key to get listed as high and as often as possible within the search engine results, to drive a meaningful amount of traffic to their websites. In the early days it was enough to put a handful of keywords and a nice description into the meta-tags of an html document, and you got a listing. Soon, other elements like page title and the usage of keywords within a page’s content (keyword-density) were taken into consideration to deliver more accurate results. It got fancier and more sophisticated but people always figured out how to cheat the system and manipulate the search results by tweaking those so-called on-page factors. Then Google came around and added a bunch of off-page factors to its search algorithm. The way Google engineers tried to rank the most relevant pages was by first counting incoming links to your websites.

The more people that link to your site or to an article of yours, the more important and relevant it must be (social proof). Manipulating the number of incoming links from relevant outside pages isn’t as easy as stuffing a bunch of keywords into your own texts. Besides that, if other sites are referring back to your writings, it is probably safe to assume that you deliver a certain amount of value.

See it as a scientific paper. The more your work is mentioned and recognized within the scientific community, the more your reputation in your field of expertise grows. Sure, spam site owners got out and built link-farms to manipulate those off-page factors, but Google got pretty good and fast at penalizing sites that use those so-called “black-hat” SEO techniques. What I will show you next is considered “white-hat” search engine optimization and is done completely without any “grey-” or “black-hat” manipulation techniques.

Starting out

Let’s just use a career as a scientist in a field of your choice as a framework to explain how easily SEO can be done, even if the algorithms the search engines use get more and more complicated.

You have just graduated from University with honors and you are considering taking on a career in the world of science. Not many of your colleagues outside of your own university know you yet, but you are highly motivated to get your research for your PhD started. You had a proper education and have built the foundation of your future success in your field of choice.

Translated into the world of a blogger, you know what you are writing about and are ready to put forth the effort and do whatever it takes to be successful. Set your mind on your goals. Nothing is more important. It won’t be an easy ride to the top. The competition in the blogging world is stiff and plenty. You will fall. Everybody falls. Your future success is determined by how often and how fast you get up on your feet again to continue your journey.

Keyword Research

When you just get started in science and you want to tackle the “Great Theorie of Life the Universe and Everything” right from the start, you will probably get burned and marked as a fantast and dreamer. What you want to do is to find that niche that is in great demand, but where not a lot has been published yet. This goes for every paper, for every report, and for every post and article.

At university when you had a project, you probably asked your professor about how to get started and found the first topic on which to base your paper. As a blogger, your professor most certainly will be Google. You have already chosen what your blog will be about, so let’s do some research to find out what your first post should cover.

Head over to Google and type in your blog’s main topic. For the sake of the example above, let’s start with the search term “geography” (without the quotes). If you search for that term you get 173,000,000 results. If you write an article and try to get good rankings for the keyword “geography” you probably won’t be very successful. It is too broad. Let us go deeper.

Let us do a search for the term “physical geography” (this time using the quotes). OK, we were able to cut down the results to 3,250,000. This is still way too broad. We have to go even deeper.

I am interested in deserts and I am fascinated by Death Valley. Let’s try to search for “physical geography” “death valley” (to filter out irrelevant results, use the quotes as stated). Now we are dealing with 12,200 results. That is way better. Now turn to the Google Keyword Tool to find out if there actually is a demand for that subject.

Are people searching for this topic? What are they actually typing into the search box to find what they are looking for? On the left you find a box that lets you choose how you want to generate keyword ideas. Let us use the “Descriptive words or phrases” search first.

Type “physical geography” into the first line and “death valley” (both without the quotes) into the second line and hit the “Get Keyword ideas” button. Have a look at the “Global Monthly Search Volume.” Don’t take the numbers too seriously, but they still give you a rough idea about what people are searching for.

Now take “death valley landforms,” for instance, and perform a normal Google search for it. Google shows you 16,300 results. Have a look at the results; do they match that exact key phrase you are looking for? Go through the results, and check how relevant they are. If you would be interested in finding out everything about the landforms in Death Valley, would you be satisfied with the results Google has provided you? You know that people are actually searching for this keyword and you are confident that you can provide more relevant information for people searching for “death valley landforms.” You probably have a winner here. Congratulations, you have found a keyword or key phrase on which to base your first article.

If you find a site with valuable and useful content in it, try to generate keyword ideas by letting the Keyword Tool to analyze the website’s content.

There is currently no rule about the exact numbers you should consider. What you are looking for is basically a niche with not too much competition which is in demand. Saying that the 12,200 results I mentioned in the example above is the number to go for is nonsense. Get a feel for the number of keywords and key phrases in your niche. And use them as a rough guideline to write several posts for your blog, which will provide you with a long-term flow of interested readers to your blog.

A SEO Plugin

I promised you that you won’t have to deal with too many technical issues. Here is one exception, but I am sure most of you are able to install a PlugIn on the WordPress system. There are a number of good SEO solutions for WordPress out there. I currently use the All in One SEO Pack. Get it installed. You will be able to use a page title that actually differs from your post title and it lets you fill out the classical meta-tags like “keywords” and “description.” The way I think about it is that those three elements (page title, meta-keywords, meta-description) should form a closed unit. Another important element to consider is the permalink of your post. If you have not already set up the permalinks for your blog, do it now. Keep it simple. The simpler your permalink structure, the better it is.

If you have done your keyword research for an article, use those keywords and -phrases in your page title and permalink and build them into the meta description. That the keyword or key phrase should also be the only keyword in the meta-keyword section is a no-brainer. While the page title and permalink is still a relevant on-site SEO element, we don’t have to argue about the direct relevance of meta-tags on search results. They are meaningless to non-existent, but there is a twist.

Advertise Your Articles and Posts

Since the page title and meta-description is often used by search engines to actually present your site in their results, you should look at them and use them as a direct advertising message to hunt for potential readers. They are nothing less than a text-ad and should be chosen carefully. For other businesses I do a lot of AdWords. Those are the little ads that Google shows above and on the right site of the organic search result. Making small changes in the titles of those ads or just by twisting the two lines of text, the effectiveness of an ad can increase or decrease dramatically. The same goes for the page title and meta-description and even for your permalink, which is similar to the display URL of a Google ad. I told you, SEO isn’t just a technical field anymore. Your page title and your site description should be written to attract humans, not machines like search engine spiders and robots.

Don’t promise what you can’t keep, but write a nice appealing ad for your great and valuable articles and blog posts and you will become successful. Remember: Content is King.

Example

Imagine you would like see the following results appearing for the search term “death valley landforms”:

Death Valley Landforms
In-depth explanations of the variety of the landforms in Death Valley, Nevada.
Death Valley landforms and other Death Valley curiosities explained.
www.landformsandgeography.com/death-valley-landforms

or

Geological Landform Interpretation, Death Valley June 18th, 1999
Free Online Library: Geology Facts of Death Valley National Park: Landforms…
Geologic History, Maps and Guides, 5th ed. (Brief Article, Book Review) …
www.freenononsensearticles.com/DV-a0142887019.php?id=63729…

If you would have clicked on result no. 1, welcome to my world. Have a look at how Google highlights the actual search term within the results.

Direct Marketing Simulator

If you want to get fancy, run some Google ads to find the perfect title for your post by split testing different alternatives. Check if you can figure out a way to structure the description by playing around with the two lines of text. AdWords doesn’t allow you to have enough characters to test a whole 160 character meta-description, but you will get a feeling for what your audience is responding to. Play around a bit with cheap non-commercial keywords and send the traffic directly to your post until you get a feeling for what people are actually clicking on.

Again, the key is to look at the page title, the meta-description and the permalink as marketing material. It is a text-ad for your site or article.

A warning: If you have no former experience with AdWords and you have no idea about what you are doing, educate yourself first. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of money. A good resource for that is Perry Marshall’s “Definitive Guide to Google AdWords.” Get the basics down and start experimenting.

For keywords and key phrases with no or little commercial interest, you can probably drive traffic for as little as 4 to 8 cents per click/visitor. How would you like to pay only about $5 dollars a day for 100 interested and highly targeted visitors? Could that build the momentum you desperately need in the beginning? Could some of them be converted into long-term returning readers and RSS subscribers?

Building Reputation

Like a scientist who is striving for his career, you have written a couple of well researched and valuable articles. By doing this on a regular basis, you are slowly building a presence in your field of expertise and people start noticing your work and referring others to your articles. You are on your way to building a reputation for what you are doing. The further down this road you travel, the higher up you get in the ranks.

By having focused on building a great foundation, you will now be able to broaden your view and put the pieces together. You have served a lot of little niches and now you will be in a position to take all those isolated theories and conclusions and challenge the established theories to leave your mark.

By that, I mean that you could write a bigger article for, let’s say, “The Physical Geography of Death Valley.” This article will include pieces and references to and from your post about “Death Valley landforms” as well as about “Death Valley climate”, the “rock formations,” the “fluvial erosions,” etc. I think you get the idea.

Google thinks about this in a similar way. They call it “aging.” It is basically nothing more than reputation building. As a young hotshot you will have to start small and you may get good rankings in some niches. If more and more sites which are relevant to the topic of your blog are linking to your work, your reputation will grow. For websites, like in the world of science, you can only reach a higher rank on the social ladder over time. You have to be consistent in what you are doing and build your reputation in a natural way (i.e., no link farms; there is no cheating).

If you are an aging, senior professor with a long list of significant publications in reputable magazines, you are on top of your career. People know you; you are the expert everybody is referring to. In other words, you are successful and where you want to be.

What the Future Holds

The algorithms of the major search engines develop and change over time and we will certainly see them refining their methods to calculate and present us with more targeted information.

Other services, systems and applications can also give indications about how valuable the content you are providing is to other people, and help to determine your rank on a virtual social ladder. Factors like the number of your RSS subscribers or how often your name, your website or some of your blog posts are mentioned in social networks and accessible communications systems or how often they are appearing in social bookmark applications will certainly be taken into consideration in the near future, too. Search engines serve people, so it will only be a matter of time until they use some of those factors.

Google Analytics is a widely used service that provides Google with further statistics and data about how visitors of a website deal with the information provided. Feedburner, probably the most popular RSS delivering service, is now owned by Google and lets them track exactly how often your subscribers are clicking on what article. The famous Google Reader generates usable statistics, too. All this data is already or will be used in the future. Maybe only a handful of people outside of Google know exactly how the latest algorithms work. The one and only way to stay on top of that complicated technical evolution is simply to provide valuable content and to put that valuable content into the hands of as many people as possible.

Be Aware

As you can see, it is easy to demystify SEO. All the Hokus Pokus and VooVoo about SEO is just hot air. If a company offers to optimize your site and promises you Top-10 Rankings if you give them only $500, run as fast as possible. Don’t take people serious who say that SEO is technical and complicated and that you will never get high rankings and a lot of traffic until you buy their crappy eBooks about exploiting niche profits to become a millionaire within 24 hours. Do not get scammed. Smart people deliver value. There is no substitute or short-cut to blogging success. You have to give in order to receive.

Get Started

Now, get started! Research keywords and niches for your topic. Download the SEO plugin I mentioned above. Write “advertising” (title, description, permalink) for your existing articles and write valuable, timeless content to build a strong foundation for your future blogging success. It takes time, but it is well worth it. The sooner you start to deliver real value, the faster you will reach your goals. You will dominate your field only by taking consistent action. You should start now!

Cheat Sheet:

• Content is King – you have to deliver value or you will crash and burn.
• Slowly build your reputation from niche articles to broader issues.
• Page Titles: Use Capitals – Have a look at your local newspaper or famous Hollywood movie titles to see how they use capitals to display importance in their titles. Use it to your advantage.
• Write for humans, not for machines. Write your article or posts first without even thinking about the usage of your main keywords or key phrases. You can insert them after you have finished putting your most valuable ideas on the screen. Don not over-do it by ripping your masterpiece apart. It must sound natural.
• Try to match the page- and the article title as well as the permalink as close as possible to the keywords or -phrase you are optimizing for. For example, the page title for the key phrase “death valley landforms” should be “Death Valley Landforms” and the permalink should be “death-valley-landforms.” The actual post title could be “Landforms of Death Valley.”
• Keyword Research: External Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker – Remember to go for niches, especially in the beginning – High demand/Low Competition
• SEO PlugIn: All in One SEO Pack
• Start using paid search to gain an in-depth inside look about what people are searching for. Drive cheap traffic to your non-commercial topic posts to build momentum. Convert those visitors into long-term readers and RSS subscribers.