11 Important Search Engine Optimization Tips

SEO or Search Engine Optimization (what is Search Engine Optimization)is one of the most (if not the most) important elements of a successful blog or website. A well search engine optimized website or blog, is the single most important thing you can do to ensure getting huge amounts of targeted traffic which ultimately determines the success or failure of your blog.

Some people choose to pay the professionals to make their site search engine friendly, which can be quite costly. I am one of those who would rather do it themselves, and learn as they go. If you are one of those, or maybe just don’t have the funds to hire a SEO expert, here are 11 Search Engine Optimization tips that you can use to make your blog a well search engine optimized blog.

Sitemap
A simple basic feature that every blog and website should have. By having a sitemap you make sure that When the search engine spider is crawling your site, it will crawl each and every page of it.

SEO-Friendly URLs
Look at these two URLs for the same page-  1- http://myblog.com/12.23.4  2- http://myblog.com/6-ways-to-make-money  If you are looking for ways to make money online, which one of these are you more likely to click? Which one of those two URLs you like better?… So do the search engines! The first one doesn’t tell you anything about what that page is about, therefore the search engine spider has to spend more time on your site to see if you have any content related to the keywords that the searcher is looking for.

Spiders don’t like to spend too much time looking for things, so they just look for it elsewhere. And there goes your opportunity to rank for that keyword. Make sure you have search engine friendly URL. It takes less than 10 second to set it up, but it goes a long way when it comes to search engine optimization.

Page Title
It should come to you as no surprise that the title of your page(article/post) is the most important thing, determining the subject of your article. Make sure you do use your main keyword in your title. Also remember to not make your title too long.

Bold Tags
Search Engine spiders are programmed to count bold text as something important. By making your main keywords bold, you make it easier for spiders to figure out what your page is about, therefor you have a better chance of ranking higher for those keywords. Of course like anything else, overdoing is not suggested.

Unique and useful Content
You have heard it over and over again- “Content is king”. Well it’s best to say, unique and useful content is king. If you just spit out what everybody else is, your not going to stand out. Why would people choose you over someone they already have been reading from? Create quality and unique content. It will keep your visitors coming back for years to come, plus other blogger will link to you if you have killer content, which of course create backlinks that contribute towards a higher ranking.

Deep Linking
This is one of those things that many people over look because they simply don’t know how important it can be. Deep linking is when you link related articles to each other. Deep linking can help a single page of yours rank higher for the keywords you use. By inter linking your related content, your letting the search engines know that you have a lot of content relating to whatever keyword your aiming for. Some people think linking to the home page is a better way, it’s a mistake! Constantly linking to your home page will appear to search engines as if though you don’t have much content on your site to link to.

Backlinks
Although quality backlinks(links from high rankling authority sites that are also relevant to your niche) are much more important and useful when it comes to ranking, none quality backlinks wont hurt either. Of course, you should always focus on building quality backlinks, but whenever you get a chance, build backlinks, no matter where they come from. Lower quality backlinks may not help much when it comes to SEO, but they are still helpful for driving targeted traffic to your site.

Social Bookmarking
This is one of the easiest ways to not only get backlinks, but also quality targeted traffic as well. Google loves social bookmarking networks, and it crawls them multiple times a day. You can use plug-ins to automate the bookmarking process if your planning to bookmark to more than just a couple of social bookmarking site. I use onlywire which is a free plug-in that allows me to submit my articles to 30+ top social bookmarking sites with a click of a button.

Article Submission
Submitting articles to article directories, specially high ranking and authoritative article directories such as E-zine, can help you not only rank higher for the keywords you use in those articles, but also drives a huge amount of targeted traffic to your site. You can also submit articles as guest writer on other relevant blogs and websites.

Link wheels
Creating  link wheels is a great way to increase your ranking. Many free web 2.0 sites are considered authority sites by Google and other search engines, thus using these sites such as blogger, wordpress, hub pages and other to build a link wheel, can give you the upper hand when it comes to SEO. But, make sure you don’t over do it. Make it look natural and believable. Search engines like Google have been around for way longer than your blog has, they know what and how long it takes for a site to naturally grow.

RSS Submission
Another simple way to get your site some backlinks and traffic. You can submit Feeds of your blog, the articles you submit to article directories, and also feeds of the link-wheel’s sites and Bookmarks accounts, to as many RSS directories as you can. Every time you submit a feed, it shows up in many different sites, it basically is free advertising.

There you have it, 11 ways to optimize your blog for search engines. Although it may take you some time to master the process, it’s worth every seconds of it, because when it comes to building a successful blog or website that you can use to make money with, nothing can help you more than a proper search engine optimization.