Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Crash Course
Jun 18
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the buzzword among bloggers and internet marketers for the longest time. Slowly, SEO has crept over to the mainstream and a lot of agencies, programmers, and website designers are also now in on the bandwagon. In this post, I’ll attempt to give you guys a crash course on SEO. This is not at all exhaustive, and you can probably find a lot of other good resources available online. This is really more of a summary of what I know about SEO, and how I’ve used it to drive traffic to my websites, blogs, and clients. This is free advice for everyone, check it all out after the break.
What is SEO?
Basically you “configure” your posts and websites to specific keywords so that they can come out in the first pages of Google, Yahoo, or other Search Engines. For example, my gaming blog is one of the top results when you key in “Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood” and even “Ako Mismo” on Google.
How effective is SEO?
Roughly 60% of the 90,000+ monthly unique visitors of my gaming blog, Waukster Online, comes from Search Engine Referrals. It is a very powerful tool that bloggers can use to drive quality traffic to their websites. Other than that, SEO can also be a powerful PR tool. Combined with Blog Marketing, you can have dozens of pages worth of good reviews from bloggers for your product if you make sure that the campaign you run with them has SEO elements in it.
SEO Tips and Strategies
There are a lot of documented ways on how to do SEO. Some of which will cost you money while there are also a lot of ways to do it for free. Here are some of the things that I’ve done that I think have worked so far for myself.
1. “Keyword-ed” Content
First, pick the keyword you want to own. After that, make sure that you regularly include it in the actual body of your post. There are a lot of SEO people who claim that the more you mention it in the first 2 sentences of your post, the better. Other than that, you also might want to do the following:
- Keywords in the Page Title, Post Title, and the URL Of the Page
- Use Bold or Italics on your Keywords
- Meta Tagging. This can be done much easier if you’re a blogger and you download the All-in-one SEO Plug-in.
2. Links to your Website
There’s a school of thought that the measurement of the strength of a particular blog or site is the number of inbound links it has from other sites. In a way this is true since all of those links will really generate you a lot of referral traffic. Other than that, the links also help out in boosting your site’s overall SEO performance. What you want to happen is for the links to your site to have the keyword you’re working on as the anchor text. Here’s an example of my gaming blog, Waukster Online, trying to get the keyword for “Full Metal Alchemist”:
Full Metal Alchemist is one of the best anime I’ve watched so far!
Note that I’ve linked the keyword to a post in Waukster with a review of an episode of Full Metal Alchemist.
The challenge here is to how you can actually get those links with the proper keywords. There are a lot of ways of doing it. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve done in the past 3-4 years of blogging.
a. Buy Links. Other than SEO points you get, you can also get referral traffic. You can get this through Google Adwords, Text Link Ads, or direct buys into websites. You can also buy reviews from other bloggers or websites and ask them to link to you with the proper keywords.
b. Submit your blog to directories. I heard from a lot of people that this works but I don’t really go heavy on this because it’s too time consuming. Here’s an article you might want to check out that I came across a few weeks ago.
c. Run Blog Contests. You can give away some prizes to bloggers and part of your mechanics would involve them linking to your site with the proper anchor text.
d. Write really good content. This way others will naturally just link to you because you’ve said something that matters. You may also want to try e-mailing or notifying other bloggers about your post especially if it is relevant to them.
e. Attend Blog Events. I think this is more applicable here in the Philippines. Each time we have a major blogger event, people just love to link to one another. This is a good opportunity for you to meet other bloggers and website administrators while getting a lot of quality links from other websites.
f. Link to yourself. You can have a page on your website that has a list of some posts you want to “SEO Pimp”. You can also do this on your sidebar. If you have multiple sites and blogs, then you can also interlink.
3. SEO takes Time
Last, but not the least, let me tell you that SEO won’t happen overnight especially if you’re trying to get a highly contested keyword. If you don’t want to spend heavily on links, then the best thing you can do is to do the free stuff I mentioned above while writing regularly. Over the course of a few months, you’ll see that your traffic from Search Engines will is increasing because of all the keywords that you’ve worked on.
Some Last Tips
For Bloggers: I know a lot of bloggers who sacrifice content for SEO. Try to find a balance in doing this because eventually all the readers you get from the search engines won’t bother coming back anymore because they can’t read anything properly except of keywords in bold text repeated over and over again.
For Marketers and Business Owners: Don’t underestimate the power of SEO. Make it a regular habit to type-in the name of your company/product, or even your own name on Google and you maybe very surprised with what you see. I know for a fact that several tech companies invested heavily on blog marketing just to erase the negative posts and comments about their services. This can have a major effect on the way customers perceive your company and your products, especially with more and more Filipinos going online everyday.
I hope this post was able to help you guys out. Again, there are better guides to SEO out there. It would be good for you if you’ll try to do some more research so you can discover more techniques that will help you. Cheers!
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
These are the basics. There are more advance stuff that we bloggers and SEO wannabes ought to learn sooner or later.
Awesome notice about seo. I’m frankly amazed that it has not been pronounced earlier.