Do NOT Promote Your Blog – Know The Devil Search Engines First!
After sharing my history and some background, from today, I’m devoting this and a few yet to come posts on some concrete what, how and where things. By reading these posts you’ll be following the growth of a new blogger to the well experienced one. I wish to start with the question:
For Readers Or for Search Engines?
When we begin to talk about fixing the bugs on a website or blog and optimizing it, it is very natural to fall in this dilemma – optimize it for search engine or for reader? Search Engines are Airbus A380 superjumbo that brings 1000s of visitors every day. Nobody can ignore such a huge source of traffic – website popularity – revenue and fortune. So, your site must be indexed in greatest possible number of search engines. But these search engines have developed their own constitution, laws, rules and regulations. Now its under the responsibility of A blogger or webmaster to make her blog or website follow as many rules and regulations as possible to please search engines with a hope of favor returned.
After reading the above paragraph you might ask ‘Where is the problem then?’. The problem is that of balance. A great website that is reader friendly might not be optimized for search engine. If it were only for readers you need to build up your website, you had lessen half of the work. At first, when you come to know a long list of tasks that you need to do only to please search engine and no reader will notice those gems in your site, you’ll feel unnecessary burden and often filthy job. Take an example of URL. A short and catchy url is best for readers and for search engine a longer url containing as many of your keywords in it is best.
No matter how much you curse for the extra workload search engines has caused, its always profitable to optimize your blogs for search engines with acceptable reader friendliness. After all they are the major source of our site visitors.
Look at the following list and confirm your blog satisfies all of these specifications? If not, sit for the fixing before you go for promoting.
1. Domain Name and URL
Choose your domain name that indicates the subject matter of your blog. A short, easy to remember domain name is ideal one. Make your url so that your main keyword is included in it and is nearer to your domain name. An url like http://www.icttrends.com/seotips-how-to-set-up-url.html is far more friendly to the search engines that http://www.icttrends.com/index?category=35&post=14. You can make this happen in your blog if it is not pre-provided by using some SEO plugins. I’ll be talking about them in detail in some other day.
2. Title
A descriptive text that is displayed on the title bar of your browser when you open website is the title of your page. This should be descriptive and should include your keywords. Search engines give more value to the titles.
3. Headings
Headings are the topic titles in your article. Upto three level of heading are given importance. Try to include your keywords in headings.
4. Anchor text
Anchor text are the bookmarked text in your page. Some of the anchor text might be hyper-linked and some might not. Search engines takes all of them into account. So include anchors to the important keywords in your document. In case of linked anchors use some descriptive and predictive text rather than click Here for related content sort of anchors.
5. Keyword Meta
Keyword meta tags are written just for search engines and are not displayed on the browsers for users. Search engines reads these keywords and categorizes your website accordingly in their database. So it is always a good idea to list all of your possible keywords on your keyword meta tag.
6. Description Meta
This tag too is written only for search engine. The description are displayed on the search result when somebody queries. Thus it must be catchy and convincing that your site contains what they are searching.
7. DOFOLLOW or NOFOLLOW
These are flags specified in your anchor text that tells search engines whether it should or not follow the link your hyperlink refers. Any link with dofollow is counted for PageRank calculation (page reputation) whereas nofollow linking won’t contribute towards this.
8. Alt Text
When inserting images in your blog you can specify Alt Text for the image so that any browser that can’t show the image will display that text to let user have idea what is placed here. These alt text are read by search engines and it gives adds to your search engine favor.
Well, today I listed the major areas where a blogger should drop her first sight. Tomorrow I’ll be elaborating and discuss about Domain Names. What you need to pay attention and how can you obtain a domain name. As always I’ll be waiting for your comments and suggestions. Hey point me out where I made mistakes, I’ll bow my head.
