SEO and Web Content

IV. Optimizing Your Blog For the Search Engines

The next task is to optimize your blog for crawler-based search engines to find it. Before submitting your blog to search engines and web directories, make sure you have inserted the keywords related to your blog’s topic inside the page title, in meta tags for description, and into the images’ alt tags and the links’ title tags. This task requires knowledge of HTML.

A. Placing the targeted keywords inside a web page

Step 1: Go to your blog’s template by clicking on Customize (if you are on your blog’s homepage viewing it like a normal websurfer), or you can go to the tab which says “Layout” and then click on the submenu that says “Edit HTML”.

You will be presented with the blog’s page coded in XML format. All you need to focus on is the area on top inside the HEAD tags. Create the following lines of code in Notepad and copy them:

<meta name=”description” content=”A Short Description of your Blog”/>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword 2, keyword3″/>

Paste the lines of code immediately below the PAGE TITLE. See examples in the screenshot below:

The PAGE TITLE tag and the META tags are very important for search engines. The text found inside the PAGE TITLE:

<title>Online Marketing Blog</title>

is used as the Title for each link found in the search engine results. The same text is seen displayed on your browser’s Header at the topmost bar above the menus, and is seen on the tab for each page.

The text within the DESCRIPTION meta tag is used as the blurb for each link in the search engine results. The keywords alone will not motivate the web surfer to click on your site’s link. Your description of the site must emphasize the keywords. However, avoid using the words FREE, SALE or BEST since these are associated with SPAM sites. One way is to lessen the adjectives; another way is to place the keywords nearer the beginning of the sentence.

Inserting the keywords inside the ALT tags of images and the TITLE tags of links is not essential, but beneficial in the long run. All you need to do is describe the image or the site the link is pointing towards. This will help the reader when navigating through your site or when images are slow to load on a page.

Step 2: Inserting tracking codes from Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Google Analytics

Now that you have put your keywords in place inside the PAGE TITLE and inside the META tags, you must provide the major search engines access to your site’s pages and links by submitting your blog to Google Webmaster Tools and to Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard

Make sure you are logged in to your Google Account. Go to the Google Webmaster Tools homepage and signup. Then you go to your GWT Dashboard and submit the URL of your blog.

Submitting your blog to Google Webmaster Tools will ensure that Google will keep track of changes in your blog or site and inform you speedily of any errors found in your webpages. You don’t have to resubmit your site to Google for the webpages to be indexed. Once is enough.

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