How To Set Up A Blog: Part 4 - On Page SEO

This article is part 4 of the How to set up a blog series. In part 1 we looked at how to set up a blog, part 2 of the series, we looked at how to write attractively for readers, in part 3 of the series, we looked at what to write by finding your likes and passion.

Now, hopefully you should have a blog full with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen niche, as opposed to a lifeless fact sheet or boring stat blog.

See Previous article in the series here: How to Set Up Blog:Part 3:Where to Find Writing Ideas

How to Get Traffic To Your blog:

However, no matter how delicious your content is, if there is nobody to read it you can’t generate profit from it. Traffic is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information. Simple enough.
However, to get traffic onto your site, you have to think backwards. Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com, to name a few more popular ones. So, to get these people on your blog, your blog needs to rank high on search result pages of these search engines. When these people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog!

The art of getting your blog or website onto high rankings on search result pages is called search engine optimization. It is a very complex and hard subject to master, (I have learned a few tricks for years of blogging but still there is lot of knowledge to gain) but that doesn’t stop us from learning simple yet effective techniques to conquer the search results for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as “fat loss”, but I’ll teach you how to overcome that later.

On Page SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, meaning when someone is searching for certain terms let’s sat how to start blogging, I want this series to come up from this blog. We can do that by on page SEO. Let’s break it down for simple illustration that makes sense. For now, let’s determine the keywords that you want to optimize your site for.

For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, you’d want to check in Google whether it is a very competitive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 search results. Think you can beat 29, 000, 000 sites at your first attempt? I don’t think so.
Now, let’s try to narrow down our scope. Let’s look for “technological gadgets” instead. At this time of writing, Google lists 792, 000 results. That’s more manageable, but you’d like to search for more focused keywords. However, let’s optimize your blog for “technological gadget” just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you’re optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title. For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great. You can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the WordPress blog when you’re creating it. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML! That helps for sure.

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you’re optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the <h1> and </h1> tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”). Since we’re posting a blog, the <h1> </h1> tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant. So in html you can write your keywords in <h1> Technical Gadgets </h1> to make search engine take notice. It would look like this below; Technical gadgets on your blog (without the tags)

Technical Gadgets

One last bit, you should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic. Obviously this is an example, as I am not writing here about gadgets but how to set up a blog so I would focus on h1 and h2 tags with those without making it hard to read for readers.

Write for People:

However, this is the most important bit of all. Always keep in mind that you’re writing for real life people who read your blog to obtain information, so it is very stupid to spam your blog with keywords! In fact, if you do that, the search engines will end up thinking you’re spamming and drop your ranking further down into oblivion… So keep in mind! Write for humans, not search engines!

You can do SEO without being overly writing your keywords, tagging your sentence and most of all never write tips on ALL caps. It does not make easy reading. Focus on SEO without being paranoid about it. With time and consistent writing traffic and readership will increase as well.

Stay tuned for next in series; Part 5: How to Set Up Blog:Part 5- Off Page SEO Part 1