Blogging tips, tricks and tools – make money blogging

When it comes to the art of receiving free traffic directly from search engines everybody seems to have their own opinion of how to get page one rankings for a website. Unfortunately, search engines like google do not reveal their algorithm to anybody… I doubt even Matt Cutts would entirely understand how websites are ranked, although he would doubtless have a better idea than most.

So how to do know where to focus our SEO efforts?

In my experience, the most important factor in gaining free traffic from search engines involves GETTING BACK TO BASICS!

Sure, all these new fangled techniques involving social media sites, video and audio files etc have their place in helping a site get good rankings. But if a site is poorly optimized to start with then the effectivness of these techniques will be limited… and lets face it, the vast majority of sites out there are poorly optimized. For goodness sakes, most website owners don’t even bother to do keyword research, or if they do then the research is rudimentary at best (i.e. how many searches does the desired keyword get?) As a result they end up targeting keywords that may be too broad or have far too much competition… then they wonder why they’re not getting traffic from search engines… sheesh!

So what are the basics? The basics are:

1. Domain name:
2. Website Title:
3. Backlinks:

Well, you could also say that keyword research is basic. I will deal with this aspect in another article. For now the assumption will be made that thorough keyword research has been performed and potentially profitable keywords chosen.

So, to deal with each aspect individually:

DOMAIN NAME: Every website page should target specific keywords. With the main domain it is important to utilize the primary keyphrase within the domain name. For example, if your name was Stinkbottom Fartworthy and you had a site about dog training you wouldn’t name your site StinkbottomFartworthy.com, no matter how memorable it was because it has nothing whatsoever to do with dog training. To rank for the keyword ‘dog training’ it is far better to use the domain name dogtrainingtips.com. Even though this particular keyword would have huge competion if your content matched the domain you would eventually gain a reputation as a dog training site and rank well for the keyword.

Having said this, it is important to note that initially you need other pages on your site that target much less competitive keywords like, ‘how to train small dogs’, ‘how to teach your dog tricks’ etc. These pages will generate traffic for your site. As you pull in more of these ‘longtail’ keywords (keywords containing more than three words) the site will begin to rank for the more competitive keyword in the domain name.

So how do you include longtail keywords in urls? That’s easy, simply include the keyword in the filename of the html file. So www.dogtrainingtips.com can have a subpage of how-to-teach-your-dog-tricks.html which means that the direct access url becomes www.dogtrainingtips.com/how-to-teach-your-dog-tricks.html. If your site happens to be a blog you can set your post permalink (permanent link) to use the post title as the page id. That way you end up with the same url.

WEBSITE TITLE: Your website title is found in the header section of html code. The title is the text that appears in the colored bar across the top of the browser window. A lot of sites do not optimize this section but correct optimization goes a LONG way to convincing search engines that your site should be ranked for the keywords contained in this tag… especially when the page content matches aswell.

BACKLINKS: This is absolutely the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of SEO. This is where the social media sites etc come into play. A backlink by definition, is a link on another site that points to your website.

There are two very important things to keep in mind with backlinks.

1. Backlinks on related sites are far more valuable than those on unrelated sites. In the example of Mr Fartworthy’s dogtraining site. For him to have backlinks on a site about dog training (or even dog breeding) is going to be much more effective in increasing the search engine ranking of his site than having them on a site about trucks. In general, one link on a related site is worth 5-10 links on completely unrelated sites.

2. If you want your site to rank for a specific keyword, use that keyword as the anchor text for your backlinks. Anchor text is the text that people click to visit your website. So to rank for the keyword ‘dog training tips’ you would use that as the anchor text. It is important to note that not all backlinks should use this anchor text as it looks unnatural to search engines. So it’s good to use other anchor text also, like your name or some other keyword.

You can find my comprehensive report called Simple SEO at Simple SEO

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