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Many of us bloggers are constantly looking for the next big SEO revelation. We’re looking for the killer secret that will land our blog on the top 10 in Google for our targeted keyword. While we’re wasting hours away looking for the big fish, we fail to see thousands of little fish swimming past us, that could’ve easily been caught to fulfil the day’s catch.
There are so many thing in terms of SEO that bloggers know and don’t do. Not that they are ineffective nor black-hat. But just because it’s effect isn’t that big. But like the fish analogy above, what we fail to understand is that a lot of those methods collectively can really make a significant impact on the SERPs that you’re targeting.
If I had a nickel for every blogger not using image alt tags in their blogs, I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life. You know, when a search engine spiders a web site, it really can’t see the image. How it identifies what the image is solely by looking at the alt tag. The alt (Alternative) tag is used to give the description of the image, when the image is still loading or being hidden in the browser. But, by specifying a meaningful alt tag, you can significantly increase the keyword density of the page as well as pull off some hits from Image Searches.
When you’re using PHP redirects to direct your visitors to you affiliate links, be sure you’re not redirecting the search engine spiders. Search engine spiders absolutely hate this! (being PHP redirected – it makes them dizzy I heard) So, be sure to add rel=”nofollow” to all your affiliate links.
If you’re into advanced SEO, you might be already doing this. But if you’re not, just give it a shot. The theory behind Google’s PageRank is that it gives you credit for other linking to your blog, and takes that back when you link to other sources. And this applies when you’re linking to pages from your own blog too. (thought not so much as outbound links) For an example, if you display “10 popular posts” and “5 related posts” per each page, 15 links per page are so draining your Link Popularity away for no reason. Spot these and nofollow them accordingly. Let the spider find your pages from your XML sitemap.
If you haven’t thought of optimizing META tags in your blog, I recommend you first use a tool like this. It’s really critical that you have META tags – and that you optimize them too. Most of the people let META description be auto-generated. This is quite alright. But be sure to at least optimize your home page and other articles that you’re receiving a faint bit of Search Engine traffic.
When bloggers use homepage excerpts, they are not only trying to influence more page views but also trying to save their blogs from duplicated content. Search Engines will penalize you very badly is they find the same content in your homepage and the single posts that the homepage is linked to. For this purpose, you can use anything from Ajaxed WP to Excerpt Editor WordPress plugin.
Good tips but I think meta tags are a thing of the past. It can actually be disadvantage to use Meta tags.
Nada.. Respectfully disagree.. META tags still get weighed a bit and you can even see META descriptions when a page is listed in Google Search Results..
Nice tips , but adding an excerpt in the home page might scare away the readers
Yeah? How come? Thanks for the compliment
Alt tags are important so that people find you on image searches.
True. Image Searches are also based on the keyword density of a page so it’s not the only thing if you want to get some traffic off Image Searches.
Wordpress plugins like the All-In-One SEO Pack and HeadSpaces2 help a lot with the metatags. So does simple tags. Using anyone of these tools will put the tags for your post in your meta tags. Then all you have to worry about is choosing correct tags.
Choosing the correct tags – that’ the hardest part right? A lot of trial and error optimizations needed.
I followed your step on nofollow on all affiliate links. But, frankly I don’t think it will drag our pagerank down.
Previously, one of my blog have affiliate to some forex sites. But, the page rank improved from 0 to 1 and 1 to 3 during first 8 months. During this period, I never change anything on the affiliate dofollow links. Personally, It was about 4 months ago. I don’t know now. The TOS of google pr keep changing is it?
If you log in to the Google Webmaster Tools, you will be able to see that Google had restricted access through your affiliate links for the googlebot. I’m not sure whether it degrades the PR. But it definitely sets off an alarm on the googlebot.