Basic SEO tips for blogging beginners

SEO is quite a favorite topic between internet marketers and bloggers alike and many websites are in place focusing only on SEO. So, it won't be possible to discuss it all in one post. In this post, I will deal about very basic of SEO. I will not dive into advanced things and craft this post with a newbie in mind.

With this said, let us now jump off to know some basic SEO.

What is SEO and how a blogger can benefit from it?
Although this might not be a difficult question to answer for many of you but let me answer this for someone who has just joined the internet world and has no idea about it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In its simplest form it is the things you do on your site and off it to get high search engine rankings. Search engines rank websites by taking certain factors into account. SEO is just knowing those factors and applying that knowledge to attain a high search engine rankings.



Now let us take the other part of the question. How SEO can benefit a blogger?
Well, the success of a blog depends upon the traffic it gets.You are a successful blogger if you are getting more hits on your blog.Furthermore, search engines are one of the best sources of traffic. So, by attaining a high search engine ranking you can assure you find readers to your blog.

So How can I optimize my blog for search engines?

As I have said earlier, search engine optimization is a vast topic to deal with in one post. But in most of the cases a basic knowledge of SEO is just enough to get high rankings.Here are some of the points that you should know to make your blog more search engine friendly.

• Do a solid keyword research- Keywords are the words or phrases that are used by people to make searches. A keyword used time and again to make searches and with less website using it in their pages is better. Now, to find such a keyword you have to do a keyword research.Here is the link of the post where I have discussed keyword research in some detail. Choose three keywords for your post ,one primary and other two secondary.
  
• Use your keyword in title ,sub-title and uniformly in the content- Titles are the part that get most attention by the search engines. So, it would always be good idea to use your primary keyword in title.Furthermore, use your secondary keywords in subtitles and all of them through out the content.
• Make use of html tags- Search engines take a close look at the things written in bold, italic or in heading. So, make use of bold and italic Html tags to emphasize your important points. Just make sure your important lines contain your keywords.
  
• Add fresh content regularly- Search engines in general and Google in particular love fresh added content. A site/blog with regularly updated posts get some preference by search engines.So, write more content and add pages to your blog regularly.
• Make navigation easy- Search engines (and also humans) love easily navigable sites. Make sure you have interlinked your related posts with each other. Navigation makes crawling easy and also that your pages are crawled properly. Other things you can do is, list your top and popular posts from your sidebar.Details in the post-"Organic search engine optimization part-3- internal linking".
  
• Don't use java and flash overly- Unllike humans search engines are blind to javascripts and flash. So, keep use of javascripts and flash to bare minimum.Furthermore, java and flash cause delay in page loading this will cause improper crawling of your blog and is also irritating for most visitors.
• Build links for your website- A link from other website is seen as a vote to your page by search engines. More votes to your blog mean you have worth content and deserve a high high search engine ranking.Furthermore, a vote (link) from an authority site has more weightage than a link from 'C' grade site.Links increase Pagerank of your blog which is one of the metric used by Google to rank websites. For details read the post- "Pagerank Explained." Read the post " 10 powerful ways to build links" for details of link building.
  
• Use keywords in the anchor text- Anchor texts are the words used to link a page from another one.Having your keyword in your anchor text is seen as search engines as the page being relevant for that keyword. So, instead of using 'click here' or 'here' use your keywords as anchor text.

I think this much is the basics of the search engine optimization every blogger should know. I would like to say here that often there is temptation to write with your keywords and search engines in centre of your mind. My word of advice here would be to write content for humans and use your keywords in a way that it does't interferes with the user experience.