So many people fail at gaining traffic to their blog, because they don’t take the time to learn about the top tips and tricks of on-page or off-page search engine optimization (SEO.)
Since traffic is the main key to making money blogging, learning these top SEO tips and tricks is critical.
Understanding The Top SEO Tips And Tricks Equals Blogging Success
Having a complete understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to your blogging success.
It took me more than a year to learn the basics of SEO, because I didn’t have a clue about what information I needed to learn, or even where to find those all important top SEO tips and tricks.
My goal is to shorten the timeframe of your learning experience and get you headed in the right direction to find the best information you’ll need to help you make money blogging.
Now that I have a fairly decent understanding of the top SEO tips and tricks, and I follow the basic rules of on-page and off-page SEO, my blog pages get ranked quickly.
I get an incredible amount of traffic from many long tail keywords as a result of adopting these tips. You will too.
Just The Basics Of SEO For Now
I won’t be going into heavy detail on all of these top SEO tips and tricks below, because the post would be way too long and this is a lot to swallow for any beginner.
I will save the extreme details of each SEO tip for future posts. I only want to familiarize you with these terms for now.
Once you become familiar with these money making SEO tips below, I highly recommend surfing the Net to read what other bloggers write about each item.
This search process is basically the same process I go through when I discover a new item of interest that could benefit my blogging career.
If you can learn and adapt these top SEO tips to all of your blog pages, you’ll have greater success at making money blogging, and much quicker than most bloggers who don’t have a clue about SEO.
I wish I had this list of items to read when I first started learning about making money blogging.
If you are new to blogging, all of the information below might seem daunting at first. Don’t worry.
It will all become second nature before long. You’ll see. Just hang in there. Success comes to those who are patient and persistent.
Blog Page Titles
For your blog “home” page, you will choose three sets of short keyword phrases that are most fitting to your blog niche.
You will have researched those keyword phrases heavily before you add them to your blog, because all three main sets of keywords will not be changed for the lifetime of your blog.
The Blogchise Internet marketing program goes into great detail about selecting your blog title keywords. You won’t find a better Internet marketing program.
I will also be discussing blog page titles in great detail in another post coming soon.
The title of your post or article pages will automatically be the title keyword phrase for that page, and the second two sets of keyword phrases will be the best selected keywords for your blog niche that you already selected for your blog home page.
Carefully select keywords for your post and article titles and use those keywords throughout the content.
Meta Keywords
Your meta keywords will be the keywords you carefully select for each of your blog pages.
See the meta keywords image below.
I use the “All In One SEO Pack” WordPress plugin to add in my keywords.
Meta Description
You will carefully write a keyword rich description for each of your blog pages using the keywords you selected for each page title and content.
The keywords you choose for each page will be well researched and related to the page content to help your blog pages get a better rank by Google. Better rank equals more traffic to your blog.
See the detailed post about a meta description.
Content
The content will obviously be the well written text on each page discussing the topics you carefully choose based on your blog niche.
Your content will offer a small percentage of the same keywords as your page title, tags and description.
Be sure to give the search engines enough content to chew on … at least 300 to 500 words per post or article. Adding even more words will never hurt your ranking. I put out between 800 and 1,500 words per post.
Header Tags
Use all three header tags (H1, H2, H3) if possible in each post or article to break up your posts and articles.
Using the header tags not only makes your pages look more interesting to the human eye, rumor has it that Google also likes to see the header tags with your carefully selected, relevant keywords.
As preached by most top bloggers, use your main keyword phrase in only one H1 tag.
Don’t go overboard with using the keywords in your header tags or Google will look at your site as spam. If you write like any normal person, the titles within your header tags should end up with a decent percentage of the keyword phrases you’re trying to get ranked.
All of your header tags don’t need to have the keyword phrase in them.
Images
Be sure to add one or two relevant images to all of your posts and articles.
Adding images to each post and article is another benefit for the human eye, and for Google’s eyes.
Your images will also get ranked by Google and the result will be more traffic to your blog.
Image Tags
All of your post and article images should have the “alt” and “title” tags filled with your main keywords to let Google see what the image is about, and to help your images get ranked.
I get more images ranked and listed on top in Google searches by properly adding the main keyword phrase in each of the image tags.
Two to three percent of my blog visitors come from image searches. Had I not optimized my images properly, I would not have had those visitors, or the sales that come from those visitors. One ranked image on one post could possibly earn you $50 extra per month in affiliate commissions, because you gain the traffic to your blog.
Videos
Since Google owns YouTube, my bet is you’ll get better ranked pages if you add a relevant YouTube video to your posts and articles. Videos add to the user experience.
Make sure the video title and description offers the keywords you want ranked for the post or article. It’s always about relevancy.
If you can’t find a relevant video, I suggest creating one for your post or article. Be sure to title the video using the keywords you want ranked.
Load the video on YouTube and add your keywords to the description and tags. Then, load the video link on your blog post or article page.
Bold Keywords
Be sure to bold only one of the main keyword phrases in your post or article content. Any more than one will probably be considered spam by Google.
Italic Keywords
Be sure to italicize only one of the main keyword phrases in your post content. Same as the bolded keywords. Only one.
Rel No Follow Tag
Add the “rel no follow” tag to the links within your pages that you don’t want the search engine spiders to follow. These would be links to images and to low ranking sites.
Textual Links
As mentioned above for “Internal Links,” use relevant keyword phrase textual links when linking posts and articles to pages within your site, and also when you link to high PR pages outside of your site. See “External Linking To High PR Pages” below.
Sitemap
Be sure you have a sitemap built for your blog from day one. I like to use Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin.
Keywords
Be sure you have the same, well selected keyword phrases in your title, content, images and tags. Don’t double up on keywords in any of these areas, or Google will look at your page as spam and it won’t get ranked. You’ll more than likely get punished for the spam.
Internal Links
Using relevant, well selected keyword phrases within your post and article page content, link one or two of those keyword phrases to one or two other relevant pages within your blog. Allow those textual links to be followed.
Don’t go overboard with internal links from one page. One or two internal links is plenty.
External Linking
I’ve been experimenting with this and linking to outside pages does not do your site any good. I think Google will look at your site for selling links if you start linking to pages outside of your blog.
I would stick with linking internally only and make sure everything else is no follow if you have to have a link.
That should be enough information about the top SEO tips and tricks for any beginner to chew on for a while.
As I recommended earlier, do more research on each of the SEO tips you don’t know a lot about.
Making money from your blogs all has to do with only a few basic principles and rules you will need to learn and apply. Once you learn those principles and rules, operating your blogging business will be much easier.
The initial learning process is always difficult. Hang in there. Perseverance always pays.
Stay tuned and keep coming back here for more details about the top SEO tips and tricks I will be posting soon.