Basic SEO Tips For New Bloggers
Posted: January 11, 2008 by Nate Whitehill Filed Under: Blog | 2,130 views
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic that every new blogger eventually has to learn about and become aquainted with. We pride ourselves on creating SEO-friendly blogs, but there are always more things that can be done to enhance the SEO functionality of your blog.
Below, are a few tips from Ahson Rafiq, a young web developer who runs a great blog on search engine optimization called Blueverse.
Keyword Research - Targeted Domains
Having a good domain can help your SERPS in a lot of ways, and it makes your job as a SEO much much easier. On the other hand, if you’re sure of your content targetting skills, you can make the most vague domains work just as well. The most common way to choose a niche blog, in order to either make it a personal brand or just to make money, is to do keyword research for the most commonly searched terms. I suggest checking out Google Trends and running a few queries to see which keywords would work best for you.
It is also important that you don’t step on anyone elses brand name, so do your research (basically just a lot of Google queries) before you finalize the domain. Now remember, don’t ever make your blog too niche specific because that will corner you “content wise” and you’ll be fighting with writer’s block. Try starting with the make money online niche because there is plenty of room left for exploring monetization.
URL Structure
Most blogs use the domain.com/post-name/ structure but that gets hard to manage, so if you’re into friendly urls choose one of the following:
/category/postname.html
/category/postname.php
/year/postname
My favorite is the default permalink structure that Wordpress blogs have:
/year/month/day/postname
If ever I need a special structure for a post, I just use the Advanced Permalinks plugin.
Using that plugin gives me choices for permalinks, which makes things much easier. You can also do this with the default version of Wordpress by going to your Dashboard>Options>Permalinks. The screen should look like this:
SMM - Social Media Marketing
If a new blogger were to ask me what they should focus on, the answer would always be Social Media Marketing. The first step is to get yourself known with a bang. A front page Digg story is the sure way to go, so at first try to make posts that could make headlines on sites like digg/reddit/stumble upon and get you insane amounts of traffic! The conversion rate of subscribers on this is hardly 10% but something is better then nothing!
Some bloggers have even made a whole living out of just SMM, if you try hard enough you just might crack it!
Linking to Other Blogs
Your first 50 or so posts should utilize references and trackbacks to bigger blogs. Blogs that are in the techno top 100 or are well known and have tons of visitors and subscrirbers, so linking to bigger blogs of the same niche can not only give your blog more authority but it also speeds up indexation as well!
Using Scrapers to Your Advantage
If you’ve ever noticed trackbacks that have flat-out plagiarized your writing, that is referred to as scraping. You now have the opportunity to stick it back to the scrapers by embedding anchor text automatically in your scraped content! All you have to do is download a plugin, and you’re good to go. Check it out here.
This post was guest blogged by Ahson Rafiq, who is the author of Blueverse, an excellent blog on search engine optimization and web development. Also, you can check out a previous post that includes some great SEO plugins here.
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Site does not come up when you click on the scrappers link. Great post btw, it realy would of been nice if you guys were bloggings when I started out as a newbie. Keep the great tips comming.
I would like to know how new sites, that are only a day old or so get over 500 visitors a day?
That was a fascinating article. I am a new blogger, but I learned a lot about some great SEO tips. Thanks, guys!
Interesting post. Tweaking your URL structure is definitely a good SEO tip.
I’ve found that adding the category name to the URL can really boost your rankings. I do have to disagree with something you mentioned though, it’s much better to use “/postname” rather than Wordpress’ default “/year/month/day/postname” as the dates have no SEO benefit and simply serve to dilute the main keywords of the title.
I’m currently writing a series of posts on basic SEO for bloggers, check it out at http://the449.com/tag/practicalseo/ .
great post - and nice site. I love the tip about the page names.
Hey Matt, thanks for the comments. The URL structure of the post titles is something that does seem to be overlooked by many both new and seasoned bloggers, but nonetheless, it is something that is extremely important for search rankings. Nice 430, BTW!
Hi Garrett, we also think that having just the post name in the title is probably the best method for achieving good results in the SERPs. Maybe Ahson (author of the above article) can chime into why he thinks having the date in there is a good idea. I think it is an interesting idea to have the category name in the URL structure and I am sure that will help with ranking for specific keywords.
The site for the RSS Scraper plugin is up, it is just under some server stress. The only way a new site gets over 500 visitors a day is because it is being linked by a much bigger site. Remember, there are only four main kinds of traffic:
1) Search traffic
2) Direct Traffic
3) Pay-per-click traffic
4) Referral traffic
All traffic follows under one of those four kinds. New sites that receive a lot of traffic? That’s referral traffic.
I liked the idea of making scrappers work for you.
You\’ve definitely done your homework on this post. Thanks very much.
Thanks a lot for the informative post. I have wondering if you make money from pay per post too? I heard that is not bad for a good pagerank blog.