Welcome to lesson 18 on blogging. 

Bad week for me because was having fever for the past few days. Got to apologize for the delay in delivering lesson 18 but I hope all of your queries have been answered. Do drop me a mail should you need any other assistance.  

Without even realizing it, I have been blogging on ABloggerBlog for 2 months. This was one of my best productions since I started blogging back in 2007. Quite surprised to see a lot of encouragement on the lessons I have produced which spur me to move on. I would like to use this opportunity to thank all the readers for giving me a great experience during these 2 months in ABloggerBlog. All right, enough of ramblings from me and I will start the lesson on Search Engine Optimizations (SEOs) proper now. 

This will be the last lesson on marketing a blog. Upon completion of this lesson, you will have a very good foundation on the various techniques that you could implement to grow your blog. However, SEOs is a must used technique because this is a great source of traffic in the long run. Imagine getting thousands of traffic per day from the search engines for your targeted keywords. This will be a group of quality traffic who is craving for more information. Thus, the chances of converting search engine traffics to subscribers are pretty high.

What Is SEOs?

SEOs is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via organic search results for targeted keywords. Simply put, it means improving the position of your website on the Search Engine Results Page. (SERP)

What Is SERP?

SERP is a list of webpages shown on the search engines for a particular keyword search. The list of webpages usually contains title, a short description of the content and also a link to the page. Therefore, when I said ranking high on SERP, it means getting listed on the top few positions of the results page for a keyword search.

Why Is SEOs Important?

SEOs help a website to climb in the SERP for targeted keywords. The higher your page is on the SERP, the better the chances that people will visit your site. However, you still have to use the same method that I mention in lesson 2 to check if your targeted keywords are getting any searches every month. 

Most webmasters are concentrating on improving their SEOs since this is the best free source of traffic in the long run. It will take you 3-6 months to rank high on search engines for a keyword that has a decent amount of searches every month. SEOs are considered to be successful only when you hit the top 3 position on the search engines. Put yourself in the same shoes, you will always click on the link of the top 3 position first before even looking at the rest.  

Apart from SEOs, the other factor that affects your Google rankings is Google Pagerank. But I believe that if you are able to improve your SEOs, Google Pagerank will come naturally since it just involves building backlinks which is also part of the technique to improve SEOs. So stop worrying if you got Google Pagerank or not because just focusing on improving SEOs will eventually get you a PR. I guarantee this.

Black Hat Vs White Hat SEOs

Have you heard of the differences between these 2 approaches of SEOs? As the name suggests, black hat SEOs is not an accepted technique to use by search engines and will be penalized. On the other hand, white hat SEOs is the technique that I will be teaching you later on this article. But, I will briefly run through the various type of technique that is known as black hat. I am not encouraging you to use it but instead to let you know so that you would avoid implementing it on your blog. Below are the few commonly used black hat SEOs which you may or may not know, falls under the black hat category:

1) Mass blog networks

This is to set up 50-100 blogs targeting different keywords and linking to the main blog. For example, when you use Google Adwords keyword tool, you will find a list of similar keywords that people have search. Thus, instead of just targeting 1-2 keywords, people who uses black hat SEO create a network of blogs targeting the entire list of keywords provided by Google. They will then link it back to the main blog.

2) Overcrowding of keywords

Overcrowding the site with your targeted keywords are also considered black hat incase you don’t know about this. These sites basically have very little content and most of it is filled with keywords. Their purpose is to rank high on search engines and get individuals to buy their products.

3) Invisible text

This means placing white text on a white background which means that readers are unable to see it thus naming this as invisible text. The text usually contains keywords which are not wanted to be viewed by readers but will be seen by search engine spiders.

4) Redirecting

This is used when a site gets rank pretty high on the search engines. Therefore, instead of getting visitors to read their site, they redirect it to their affiliate sales copy. Although this method does not help in improving your SEOs, it makes use of the SERP rankings to redirect visitors to a sales page instead of its own website. Pretty unethical isn’t it?

2 Approaches To Improve White Hat SEOs

There only 2 approaches to improving SEOs – mainly on page SEOs and off page SEOs. On page SEOs means action in which you can take on your own website to improve on SEOs. This basically means the usage of titles, tags etc.

Off page SEOs means action you need to take outside of your own website which is building of backlinks.

How To Improve Off Page SEOs

The only way to improve your off page SEOs is by building backlinks. Build natural and quality backlinks overtime. Forum marketing, comment marketing and article marketing are all great ways to build 1 way link.  

Reciprocal links has lesser weightage compared to 1 way link because there are simply too many websites that try to engage in link exchanging as a way to improve SEOs. If you really want to do link exchanging, then I suggest you using triangular linking.

Triangular linking means Site A will link to Site B, Site B will link to Site C and Site C will link to Site A. Thus this creates a 1 way link to your site. Read the rest on how to build backlinks from my previous lesson.

7 Ways To Improve On Page SEOs

1) Title tags

Name each of the individual articles with the keywords you wish to target. It will look something like the image below.

This title tag is the link that will appear on search engine thus it is important to choose the right title. You can used SEO Title Tag plugin to edit your articles.

2) Tags

Using of proper tags for every of your post helps in SEO as well. If you remember, I have told you to use the tags on every of your published articles as it will be helpful in your SEOs.

3) Sitemaps

Wordpress makes it so simple for bloggers to create the sitemap with the aid of the Google sitemap generator plugin. Next submit to Google Webmasters and it makes the spiders crawled to the page that are deep into your root directory as well.

4) Internal linking

I mention earlier on lesson 8 that internal linking are good for building backlinks. This is also effective in improving your SEOs. Find those articles that have been neglected by search engines and pass some link love to it as well. Do not let your old articles go down the drain.

5) Use of proper permalinks

Avoid using long links such as http://abloggerblog.com/2008/11/lesson-16-comment-marketing/. Search engines often favor the page closest to the root directory. Simply put, your permalinks should be like this http://abloggerblog.com/lesson-16-comment-marketing/. For my case, I have a long URL which includes the year and month that I published my articles.  

I really regretted this but I couldn’t change right now because I will lose all the backlinks should the permalink be changed. Appreciate anyone who can help me in solving this problem. But don’t follow my footsteps if you are just starting out.

6) Use of robots.txt

Robot.txt is a file which gives instructions to tell search engines spiders which pages are to be ignored and not to be indexed. The purpose is to stop the pages from appearing in search engines to prevent any duplicate issue. Read ThouShallBlog’s guide on how to create your robots.txt should you have no idea how to do this.

7) You tell me

I would love to listen to your way of improving your on page SEOs. Share with me and the rest of the readers in ABloggerBlog. I will link back to your site if you mention other methods of performing on page SEOs. Hope to churn out a longer list for this. This will also be the first experiment I have on the activeness of the readers in here. Don’t let me down all right?

Additional SEO Methods From Commentators

1) There are theories stating that Google will look at the top third of a blog and the bottom 10% to 20%. – Contributed by Richard Mclaughlin.

2) Using relevant keywords in anchor text. For example, if I am targeting the keyword blog coaching, I would create a hyperlink to my blog address with blog coaching as the hyperlink text which will looks like this – blog coaching. – Contributed By Jerry.

3) Include your targeted keyword in your domain name. – Contributed By Jerry.

4) Using the all-in-one SEO plug-in for optimization. – Contributed by Jeff.

5) Use of alternative text for images. Alternative text becomes a replacement for an image whenever it cannot be viewed. – Contributed by Suzanne Franco.

6) Targeted keywords appearing within your permalinks. – Contributed by Tamal Anwar.

Tasks For Lesson 18

1) Complete all the on page SEOs and make sure you used the SEO title tag plugin.

2) Remove any form of black hat SEOs that you are using on your blog.

3) Build links, links and more links to improve on your SEOs, Technorati ranking as well as Google PR.

Subscribe to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on the first method to monetize your blog – Ads selling. Stay tuned for it.

Connect with me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/felixgoh

Check out my course outline on my previous lessons.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com