This is the first part of the SEO Tips for Beginners Series

After starting a blog and putting all the content, the next step is to focus on getting organic traffic. “Organic Traffic” is the traffic that arrives from search engines like google, bing etc. These search engines show results based on relevancy, content and the number of  backlinks. Once your website improves its search engine rankings (for a specific keyword), it will see an improvement in the inflow of organic traffic.

Why is there a need for SEO?

Search Engine Optimization techniques assist in getting more organic traffic. The reason why “Organic Traffic” is deemed important is because of the following reasons?

1. The “Organic Traffic” is very consistent source of traffic and it has lower bounce rate ( the rate at which a reader exits after reading a single page), so the readers coming via this medium have better engagement.
2. The Organic Traffic consists of new visitors, who may subscribe to your blog  and hence help in increasing the reader base.
3. Major chunk of  the adsense earnings is due to clicks by users arriving from search engines and if you are treating blogging as a business, then it is very important to improve the earnings to achieve break-even in a shorter period of time.

I would to like give some basic  SEO tips, which would be very beneficial for bloggers who are just beginning their journey:

Optimizing Title

Google and many other search engines give a lot of weight to the site title. The site titles are titles that show up at the top left of the browser as shown in the image below.

These titles are also displayed in the search engine results. According to Google, the page title is given extra weight age in search results and optimizing them should be your first priority.

The blog title is like the brand name for your brand. Add the blog name before or after the title of the article. This is important for branding your blog. People start recognizing you as a brand and so it helps in building a good brand image.

Use keywords in blog titles, which you want to target. To assist in choosing appropriate keywords, google adwords has a wonderful tool that gives you details of  monthly search volumes of a particular keyword. You need to target keywords which have very high search volume, in order to extract maximum traffic out of it.

WordPress:

You can try the All in one SEO plugin, which has all the required SEO features. You can change the title by going to the All in one seo settings and then adding %blog_title% in the post title format.

Blogger:

For blogger blogs, check out  the following post:

Optimizing Title For Search Engine Optimization in Blogger

Use Slugs in Links

Using links like www.bloggodown.com/?p=18 for articles is not a very good practice in terms of SEO. The keywords in links are given a lot of importance and using keyword rich slugs in links is a recommended SEO practice. These links contain kewords in them. For eg. http://www.bloggodown.com/optimizing-title-for-search-engine.html is a keyword rich link.

Meta Tags

Employing meta tags for a website’s SEO has been an age old practice. These tags are not displayed on the website, but they are seen by search engine bots. The two most important meta tags are meta description and meta keywords. Google does not consider Meta keywords but it still plays an important part in other search engine rankings. Meta Description should be a keyword rich description of the post ( more like a summary). Meta tags and Decription should be ideally added manually, but if you want to don’t want so much hassle, then you can use the All in one SEO plugin which will automatically add the meta tags and description for all the posts.

Stay Tuned and subscribe to our feed, The next part will cover topics like link building and Image SEO