This is a guest post by David Shaw from Shaws Web Services.
I have worked in the blogging industry for around 4 years, moving from blog to blog and doing a lot of ghost blogging for some friends.
Many of you may know me from blogs such as protycoon.com and davidshawblog.com (I no longer own these) but I decided to move away from blogging and focus on what I do best, website design and SEO.
Since I made the move into this area I have been working for several bloggers and large organizations to help them get to the top of the search engines and drive substantial traffic to their websites.
Have you noticed that some of the top bloggers don’t actually rank highly in the SERPs for their niche and rely a lot on links from other blogs and their RSS feeds?
I was shocked when one of my clients (a very well known blogger) asked me to help him get his blog to the top of the search engines for his niche. I always assumed that his blog was a leading authority and would naturally float to the top but he was down on page 3! why? Because he thought that installing a few plugins and writing keyword content was enough to push him to the top.
In truth getting to the #1 spot on Google is not always easy but it is not impossible either. After working with many bloggers I noticed that there was one thing that they were all avoiding and in my mind it is the most important aspect of search engine optimization….. Keyword Research and Targeting!
To explain my point I am going to show you how this blog (SmartBloggerz) can move onto the first page of the Google SERPs with less than 2 hours work.
Like I said before Keyword Research is hugely important, the aim to select between 8-10 specific keywords. I would try to avoid single word keywords such as ‘blogging’ or ‘money’ as they are far to broad, instead be more specific use keywords such as ‘Blogging Tips’ or ‘Make Money Online‘. Once you have selected your keywords you need to order them by importance, this can be done in two ways.
- Order them by relevance to your content
- Order them by estimated traffic
Option 1 is to order them by relevance to your content, so if you spend more time blogging about ‘blogging tips’ than ‘make money online’ then blogging tips is more important. Option 2 is about using the Google Keyword Tool and judging which keywords can bring you more traffic, ‘make money online’ has a GMS (Global Monthly Search) of 1.5 million and ‘blogging tips’ has a GMS of 14,800, this means that ‘make money online’ is more important than ‘blogging tips’.
OK, so you should now have a list of 8-10 keywords ranked in order of importance. The next step is to optimize your blog a little for these keywords, for bloggers I advise just three simple changes, all to the meta-tags:
- homepage title
- homepage description
- homepage keywords
Before you jump down my throat and start telling me that meta-tags are old school and not as important as they used to be, hear this: a blogger that I did some work for about 2 months ago went from page 3 of the SERPs to #2 on page 1 within 9 days of making these changes. This is also true of another blogger that I am currently working for who has gone from page 3 to #5 on page 1 this week.
The fact is that meta-tags are still very important in letting the search engines understand your blogs content more clearly.
Here Is My Advice:
- Aim to get the 3 or 4 most important keywords into the homepages <title> tag. Ensure that it is less than 66 characters including spaces.
- Aim to get 3 of those into the meta description as well, ensure that it still reads well as a sentence and is less than 155 characters.
- Put only your 8-10 keywords in the meta keywords tag, have them in the order of importance.
If you do this you should see your blog jump up the SERPs for your respective keywords. Here is an example of what I would have as the title, description and keywords for this blogs (SmartBloggerz) homepage:
- <title>Make Money Online | Blogging Tips | Blogging Money</title>
- Description: Make money online using our fantastic blogging tips. We guarantee that making money online is easy with our unique blogging guide.
- Keywords: make money online, blogging tips, blogging money, blog make money, blogging make money, making money on the internet, blogging guide, blogging for money
I hope you found this little insight into my world of SEO interesting. These simple tips have helped to drive traffic to large and small blogs across the blogosphere. Have you forgotten to target your keywords?
Top 10 Search Terms:
• why my blog sucks • how to add meta tags smartbloggerz • top blogs • why your blog sucks
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Article Written By David Shaw
A blogger and SEO expert from Bristol, UK. I have run many successful blogs and written as a ghost writer on some of the top blogs on the Internet.I can currently be found blogging on my personal blog: David Shaw Blog, where I share tips and advice on blogging, Social Media and SEO.
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{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
Agreed David..Meta Tags do works wonder but don’t know why people are slowly forgetting it..Well, It doesn’t affects me if they don’t believe in it
I’m currently also working to make my older blog post in assigning them meta tags properly as it couldn’t be done in past(moved from blogger platform which does not have anything for seo). It will take time but I think will surely help in rankings.
I will also implement your strategies for the homepage of this blog which you have mentioned as an example in this post. Let’s see how it goes (I want it to go upp)
Hope you do move up.
Will keep a track on it to see how you get on.
Just completed tweaking the homepage with your techniques. Let’s see how it goes.
OMG! I haven’t made this optimization to my blog. Now moving toward my blog to add keywords in description, keyword section. Thanks for reminding me.
my blog is a total mess then. for the title part maybe it’s ok but the keywords … i use the same keywords on all pages including home. plus they are too broad. it’s going to be another long night.
Yeah, it is annoying when you have been blogging for a while then need to make changes, it will be worth it in the long run though.
Good work. Give it a couple of days then check to see if the change has been picked up by the serps.
Then a week or so and your blog should move up the rankings
I’m so bad at this. I never target keywords or SEO which would explain why I’m getting no search engine traffic at the moment. I think this is my next area to work on.
You are not alone.
It is the biggest mistake made by bloggers in my opinion.
Great advice David. I’m amazed at the number of making money online bloggers fails to tweak things just a little to gain a little search engine traffic. I realize having loyal visitors is a cool thing, but and easy way to get more loyal visitors is through search engine rankings.
No matter who you are. Search Engine Traffic is essential if you want to grow your blog.
Yes It is important update that meta tags still work for SE ranking. Your tips are basic but very important. Simply changing the Title and description tag can really do the wonders
This are great tips. As well i would like to add that using SEO plugins which you can find in wordpress plugin database is very important. AIOSP is must have, there are as well other plugins that you need to pay, like seo booster pro and others.
Yes, plugins can be a massive boost to bloggers. Especially to those who are not so great with html and code.
Once upon a time the meta tags of a site and individual pages were the first thing completed when creating content. I don’t know why this has been lost as it is clearly important to the search engines at least.
I still shake my head when I look at a site to see the exact same meta data spread throughout the whole site.
Just like in life it is the small things that count.
The tips included here are great. After reading all of this, I realized that there are a lot of aspects about SEO, which I have missed. It seems that I will have to spend more time tweaking keywords and phrases. Without doing this, even the top SEO plug-ins can’t help a blog reach top search pages.
Thanks for the great article!
Yup. SEO is a very broad practice.
So many people think it is just link building. It is so so so much more.
Meta optimisation, writing style, keyword research, links, buzz etc etc
SEO is an extra step bloggers don’t want to take, because of all of the other time-consuming tasks like social networking, commenting and – writing.
I always take the time to do the top-to-bottom SEO check but on most of my posts I don’t care about search engine traffic
I wrote a post about food blogs, and that one I made sure to optimize since I really wanted to rank for long-tail food blogging keywords and sure enough, it worked. So, if search engine traffic is a goal, it’s a must.
That said, if you’re lazy, just get Scribe SEO. I’ve used it, it works, and you can tell I really think that because here I am talking about it and not including any affiliate links. LOL It’s good a decent product that bloggers who don’t have the time to sit there and compose a good optimized page or post should get. It doesn’t fix anything for you, just tells you what to fix.
Well, I do really want to use Scribe SEO but sadly it doesn’t takes paypal payment and as a teenager, I don’t have credit cards for making the payments for it.
I still never understand why all websites dont accept paypal! Surely is the most used payment system by their customers?
Oh! Well have you tried the Paypal plugin that generates a card number for you to use? I don’t know if that would work or not.
Ya, I know about it but it’s only available for US PayPal users right now…Waiting from long time for it’s roll out in my country.
And that’s the same reason why I haven’t been able to step into Email Marketing business.
KW research has always been my arch nemesis. I just don’t get the tech (numbers, percentages, etc.)
It is confusing to begin with. After a couple of weeks it all falls into place though.
Retweet button gone?
I have changed it to topsy and removed tweetmeme. Topsy loads after the page has been completely loaded.
Many bloggers are making the move to topsy! I like it,.
Appreciate the article – love the actual in depth guide compared to just talking theory. We shouldn’t write just for SEO but it should still be considered so people can actually find you.
Many Thanks!
I liked your post title David
As for the keyword set you mentioned, that happened to me mine as well just like 1000 other bloggers out there. However, I hope to rank high at couple of them a few months from now.
All you have to do is start increasing backlinks to your blog, with those keywords as the anchor text.
Something I don’t see much commentary on is that the reason for SEO isn’t limited to public content such that found on Google.com. Search within social networks such as MySpace and Facebook actually rank in the top 20 most popular search engines according to comScore.
This was direct and easy to read. Loved your 3 tips, they are really good. Catchy title too
Your advice is not new for me because it’s a well know knowledge but SEO for a website is something more complex and required a lot of time to get success
In theory blogs should rank highly naturally because they always have updated and original content.. well most of them. However they more often then not lack links and onpage SEO data
SEO is not one time thing. You have to make changes accordingly and efficiently to get to the no.1 page.
Thanks
Sure SEO is not a one time thing, but the idea behind SEO always remains the same to make your site useful for both the users and the search engines and as long as your site is good you do not need to worry too much about the algorithms. Offer useful stuff and people will show you love with links.
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In the past I wasn’t so careful with my site description, I thought that the description is not that important, but after reading some article I found out that together with on page optimization and title will help allot the SEO. Thanks for this tips