Here is a summary of 8 excellent tips to improving the SEO of your blog:

1. Content is King - quality, relevance, freshness … you can’t underestimate the importance of content!
2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For – how will people search for information that YOU want them to find? Remember write you keyword list from your visitors perspective, not the perspective of your thoughts or what you have written in the post.
3. Titles Titles Titles – structure your post titles carefully (include keywords) and make sure you populate title tags with keywords too.
4. Keywords in other parts of your post – use the keywords people will be searching for, in your post – but make them relevant and in context!
5. Link to Your Own Posts – this is a little like getting backlinks, but within your own site. But don’t over-use!
6. Links from Outside Your Blog – useful for page ranking, and attracting visitors; you can also help get backlinks by commenting in forums & other blogs, and adding in your website details where they are asked for.
7. WordPress Plugins – use the tools that WordPress contributors create; they can be pretty powerful at helping with SEO. For example, “All In One SEO Pack” makes it easier to add in title tags & keywords.
8. Readers Begat Readers – give your readers good value & interesting content, and they will tell their friends about you… and the friends will tell their friends about you … and…

Here is a link to the original article I wrote this summary from; credits to Darren Rowse of Problogger.

Enjoy this!

Cheers,

Tracey

I’m on Perry Marshall’s email list, and got this interesting email today, which will put SEO (and free traffic) into a bit more perspective for readers.

A lot of people ask me about the merits of buying clicks on search engines with AdWords, vs. getting free visitors with what’s called “search engine optimization” – loading up your web pages with strategic keywords so you can get ranked #10 or #3 or #1 on Google’s free search.

Well at first glance free is certainly better than paid, but there are some big IF’s that you need to consider first!

Remember: you can only optimize a website for maybe ten words and phrases – not hundreds – so you should choose very, very carefully.

But the most important thing is choosing the RIGHT words and phrases to optimize for.

Now here’s the kicker:

If you don’t use a pay per click strategy to determine which words and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you will almost always choose the wrong keywords. The words you initially think you want are almost always different than the ones that actually work – believe me, I’ve made that mistake many times.

Considering it takes 30 days to several months to see results when you’re playing the search engine optimization game, you CANNOT afford to target the wrong keywords.

When you do pay per click campaigns properly, you’ll see that there are almost always a few really productive words and phrases that only 2-3 people are bidding on, instead of 10 or 20 bidders. What that means is that those people are not optimizing their websites for those same keywords either.

Well just like pay per click, search engine phrases have varying degrees of competitiveness. If you want a #1 ranking for the phrase “Digital Camera” it’s going to be a LOT harder than getting a #1 ranking for “Kodak DX6340″ which is a popular digital camera. And the traffic will be much more targeted, too. When you do search engine optimization, you must pick battles you can win.

So here’s the lesson: Use my Definitive Guide to Google AdWords to properly set up a pay per click campaign, determine which keywords are productive, THEN do search engine optimization based on what really works. Then you’ll get all kinds of free traffic and even more income from your website:

http://perrymarshall.com/adwords

Recommended tools for Keyword research:
http://perrymarshall.com/google/tools.htm

Best,

Perry Marshall

So use the tools to help with free traffic, but remember FREE TRAFFIC isn’t something you can achieve overnight – you need research into keywords, coupled with a bit of advertising to get you going.

I hope you found this useful!

cheers,
Tracey
The Simple Web Company

Brian from “SEOPress Formula“, one of the many newsletters I subscribe to, says this:

About a week ago or so, I sent you an email about helping people to buy stuff they need or want. It is really a simple process.

1) Identify what folks are searching for.
2) Create a list of “money” keywords within the niche.
3) Create a website based on the money keywords.
4) Cash checks.

Sounds easy right, truth be told it is not rocket science. If I can do this … you can too.

It is simply a matter of understanding how people search, how Google and other search engines evaluate web pages and addressing these issues as you create a site.

One tip I want to give you today is based on the part about “helping people to buy”.

If the goal is to sell lawn mowers through the ebay affiliate program (or any other online merchant for that matter) then you should ONLY create content based on lawn mowers.

I see lots of webmasters adding all kinds of fancy whizz bang graphics, web 2.0 buttons, flash elements and what not too their site because they can.

WordPress makes this really easy ….

However just because you can add all kinds of cool banners and images does not mean you should. In fact … it can dilute your sites content.

If someone wants to find a hard to get part for their “lawnboy” lawnmower do you think they care about flashing images, banners and cool looking graphics? No they do not!

If they search Google and end up on your site you want them to be able to find exactly what they are looking for, quickly and easily.

When I design sites today they are simple, clean, easy to navigate. This makes it very easy for my site visitors to get just what they are looking for.

Next time your working on a web page Tracey make sure your sites content is very tightly focused on your main theme.

Only add elements to your site that helps people to find what your site offers.

An example:

If your selling lawnmowers do not add a link for people to sign up for an adsense account (or any other offer that is not a lawnmower offer).

Your visitors are looking for lawnmowers … then give them lawnmowers, and nothing else.

The key point here, for anyone wanting to ensure they have good SEO, is point 2 right near the top:  Create a list of “money” keywords within the niche. How will YOUR customers be searching for the products or services you offer? Please yourself in their shoes for a moment & that can really help.

Good luck!

Tracey