Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog: Three Easy Techniques, and also Drawbacks to SEO
Search engine optimization helps you crank up your rankings in Google. Here are three easy techniques to make your posts land on the front page of Google’s search returns:
- Put keywords in the title and first paragraph. Google places a heavy emphasis on keywords appearing in the title and first paragraph. The best placement is actually the first word in each. You can also install an SEO plugin in case you can’t fit the keywords into the title gracefully. The All in One SEO Pack allows you to customize the title that Google sees, so you can stack your keywords and still have a literate-sounding title.
- Link to everything. Incoming links are everything when it comes to SEO. The more people who are aware of your blog, the more likely they are to link to you. So link to as many people and resources as you can in each post. To automate trackback notification, install this Kramer plugin.
- Write interesting content. The claim to fame on my blog is basically one post I wrote about blog usability. It received 188 comments/trackbacks and was translated into about a dozen languages. A few popular bloggers picked it up as well as Stumble Upon and Del.icio.us. It surged my readership from 80 to 250 subscribers practically overnight. The more interesting content you have, the more people will link back to you. The more links you have, the higher your authority. The higher your authority, the higher your rank in search returns.
Drawbacks of Search Engine Optimization
How can there be any drawbacks to search engine optimization? I never considered this, and it is a bit odd admitting it. But I feel a complete loss of anonymity as well as an unfounded power. I also have a greater responsibility to be accurate. When you Google Tom Johnson, I’m on the first page. Uhm, now instead of telling people my email and phone, I can tell them just to google me.
A crazy Haitian guy from Miami called me repeatedly last week affirming he knew me and wanted support for his studies. A random searcher stumbled across my analysis of a Vimeo video and totally trashed me in a comment. Merely mentioning Kevin Shoesmith or Alan Houser in a post title put me on the first page of Google returns for their names. Last month someone gave me $100 to insert a handful of links to Web design companies on previous posts. My friend Mark Hanigan tells me I am quietly gaining a reputation for being an expert in Web technology. I attribute all of this to my increasing visibility online.
I’m not sure what will come of it. My friend Holly says “You have established yourself (in a very short time) as someone who is keenly interested in our profession, technology, and people.” I like that impression (it is true). I only hope I haven’t pigeon-holed myself into a predefined category.
Good SEO Podcast Recommendation
I listened to a good podcast on search engine optimization last week from the Information Architecture podcast. If you’re not subscribed to the IA podcast feed, you might add it to your podcatcher.
I’m fascinated by search technologies and I religiously pore over my Google Analytics statistics daily. I subscribe to an awesome weekly SEO newsletter by Axandra (http://www.free-seo-news.com/) which introduced this week a topic I’d never considered – penalties by Google on over-optimised websites:
“Google has an algorithm that detects over-optimized websites. The detected websites are downranked in the Google search results. This over-optimization filter in Googles ranking algorithm is also called the “-950 penality” because that is what usually happens to over-optimized web pages: they are downrankied 950 positions.”
The tips you give about linking and beginning articles with rich keywords are perfectly valid as they provide helpful content simultaneously to people and search engines. Over-optimisation, as I understand it, refers to combinations of things like putting titles in specific tags, using specific meta tags in a specific order, duplicating (plagiarising) content from other sources, and so on.
If I were to write an article on blog SEO I would give the same list as you (plus I’d mention the All In One SEO plugin pack for WordPress – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ – WP titles pages in a poor fashion). Understand Web 2.0, harness that understanding to benefit your readers, and search spiders will come to you.
Thanks for your thoughts, Brian. I wasn’t aware of the -950 rule — I’ll have to keep that in mind.
I think Google Analytics makes us much more aware of our site’s visitors. We know we’re not writing in a vacuum. You might also like the WP-Users Online plugin — shows you how many real people are reading your blog right now and what they’re reading.
By the way, have you noticed any discrepancies between Site Meter and Google Analytics? And how does Google Analytics account for posts read through feedreaders?
Tom,
Great post on SEO! There’s no question there is a lot to SEO.
I’m glad you enjoyed the Podcast I did with Mike Moran. The topic I found really interesting was the discussion we had on eye-tracking analysis. It’s one challenge to write for the web, knowing people can land on any page of your site through search. However knowing where people typically scan websites when looking for content, the instant they land on your site, will also help you in knowing where to place content critical for visitors.
I’m going to be doing another show with Mike in September about his next book, “Doing It Wrong Quickly – How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules.”, in case your readers are interested. http://www.iaconsultants.ca/2007/06/17/doing-it-wrong-quickly-how-the-web-changes-old-marketing-rules/
Brian thanks for sharing the link on SEO – looks fantastic!
Cheers,
Jeff
Jeff, thanks for the comment and link. I hadn’t thought about the user’s visual focus. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.
I had some interesting results for one of my blog postings, and I can’t figure out how I rank #1 in Google for it. I found out I ranked #1 when I looked at a significant increase in hits for this one post, and at the search terms used to find it. But I still can’t figure out how this could be, based on what I understand of how I *thought* Google worked.
I even wrote a post about this earlier this week: “How *does* Google work?(http://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/how-does-google-work/)
How cool to know that you are inspiring blueberry muffin baking throughout the universe!
Have you looked at the backlinks for the post? Maybe a top-ranked recipe site linked to your post. If so, the link from a top site can boost you significantly.
There are various ways to check backlinks. Here’s one tool:
http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
I plugged your specific blueberry post link in and ran the back link checker. If the tool is accurate, at least six people are linking to your recipe.
With the backlink too, you can see the page rank of each of the people linking to you. The page rank is determined by a number of things, but one is obviously the number of links pointing to them.
Still, six people linking to one post doesn’t see like it would be significant enough to come up so high in the search results.
Another element in the equation is your inclusion of the term “recipe.” Many recipe-focused websites omit the word recipe in their titles, because everything is a recipe in their site. However, if people are googling keywords, they include this keyword in their google search string, so your site rises in the ranks.
It’s a curious thing however you look at it. Maybe there’s something else I’m missing.
Hi Tom
Yes it is curious! I tried that backlinker you suggested, but the 6 links it listed seem to be website aggregators of some sort (if that’s the correct term for those sites that just have hundreds of links to other sites), so I doubt I’d be getting much traffic from them. I mean, does anyone actually *use* them?
These are the search terms used by people who came to that post on my blog (past two days):
Today
Search Views
blueberry muffin recipe 47
blueberry muffin recipes 12
blueberry muffins recipe 5
recipe for blueberry muffins 5
best blueberry muffin recipes 3
bluberry muffin recipes 2
recipe blueberry muffins 2
Blueberry Muffin Recipe 2
best blueberry muffins 2
best blueberry muffin recipe 2
Yesterday
Search Views
blueberry muffin recipe 45
blueberry muffin recipes 9
recipe for blueberry muffins 5
Recipe for Blueberry Muffins 3
blueberry muffins recipe 3
“blueberry muffin recipe” 2
Recipe For Blueberry Muffins 2
blueberry muffins 1
Blueberrie Muffin Recipe 1
blueberry muffins recipes 1
Note that the search terms used include misspellings, but I know Google tries to correct misspellings, so that probably isn’t significant. More interestingly is the use of the word “recipe”, so perhaps your suggestion is correct…
Curiouser and curiouser!
I think at this point you must feel a little strange about things. Here you wrote something that was probably a quick recipe, written and posted without much thought, and now you are being sought out by men and women across the globe for your blueberry recipe, as if your entire blog were devoted to that sort of thing.
You make me want to write a post titled “blueberry muffin recipe” on my own blog!
Actually, on my blog, I receive quite a bit of traffic for my 20 Blog Usability post. Sometimes it seems the other posts are only footnotes.
A friend of mine was showing me a slick application for web analytics – http://crazyegg.com/
It includes a heat map of where people click most often on each area of your site; the search engines and other sites referring to each page; and a unique “confetti” application with several different colored dots showing exactly where people are clicking and where they came from.
I’m going to be using Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ for my site along with this application to help make future changes to my company’s website.
This may fall outside of the scope of this conversation, but I wanted to share this tool with others b/c I think it can help improve the user experience of those coming to your site. The easier it is to find and subsequently use any content on your site, the more likely it will be that others will link to your site – thereby helping to increase your rank in search engines like Google.
Just a philosophical question, but it may be technical as well. If every blogger eventually masters the art of SEO, aren’t we just back at square one, where content counts more than anything?
letters,
If everyone masters SEO, then yes, we’d be back to square one. However, the likelihood of that is small, since so much of SEO depends on backlinks to your page. In my opinion, backlinks are not something you can easily master, since they are somewhat out of your control.
It’s the backlinks part of things that I’d like to learn more about. Once you get a pingback or trackback, does that mean there is a permanent link from the blog doing the “pinging back” to your blog – until such time as it is manually broken? I’ve read about this stuff, but it doesn’t really sink in… maybe I’m thick.
PS: I’d rather be writing too. And reading, which is why I’ve signed up for your feed
Totally agree about how people can now hassle you if your known, I had a disgruntled client try and ‘threaten’ me by researching about me and making threats etc about what he ‘researched’ – more hear
came across this in my hunts for new seo tips, i knew most of them but i agree on the way you presented it, though im really tired of seo, it seems its a loosing battle no matter my optimizations several of my sites refuse to move up in the standings and then the few that do end up falling to infinity within a month if i dont keep tweaking and changing things
hey. just stumbled across yr blog post whilst researching what others are doing for wordpress SEO and I’d say you have it about right, and thx for the kramer plugin, ..installing and testing later on
someone previously said we will soon be getting BACK to the point where content is king. We never left that point really, as great & unique content will get it’s own links without you trying.
otherwise, there is still also much that can be done to help yourself in that area, even if you havent written that Pullitzer prize winner just yet..
Rhonda has some nice rankings for muffin up there.
Nice post Tom. Great blog by the way. Writing interesting content is a sure-fire way to gain more visitors and establish yourself as well on the web. I believe information is the lifeblood of any internet business. The more interesting content you have, the better. I also think it’s good to outsource content creation sometimes as it’s not easy to write quality content on a regular basis.
I was just telling my buddy about this. At last he’ll believe me! Haha