Comments on: Learn the Basics of SEO – Ten Habits Day 4

By: Ten Habits of Successful Blogging – Angela England

Ten Habits of Successful Blogging – Angela England — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:31:36 +0000

[...] Learn the Basics of SEO (by Kelby [...]

By: AngEngland

AngEngland — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:36:15 +0000

@Cheryl – it’s definitely not as intimidating as people try to make it. The geeks take it totally overboard. That’s ok though – we won’t let it stop us. Just like I don’t let professional athletes intimidate me out of trying to stay in some sort of decent shape with my home workouts, right?

@Krista – Sometimes a reminder is all it takes.

@delicateflower – It’s ok to have cutsey titles sometimes. Especially if you have a loyal group of readers or subscribers. But mix-it-up and give Google a chance to bring you new readers as well!

By: delicate flower

delicate flower — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:07:48 +0000

I’ve done the same thing that Dominique mentions, using funny or ‘flip’ titles for posts on my personal blog.. so maybe I will revisit that.

Thank you. I find SEO’s a bit confusing and did visit Google Analytics but think that it might mess up my stats through WordPress.com so will not venture there yet. I am looking forward to reading this series. I found you through Julie of Writing Roads.

By: Krista

Krista — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:00:48 +0000

Thanks. It’s somewhat difficult to balance SEO with sounding real. Thanks for the reminder

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:00:46 +0000

Okay..I am just getting around to commenting. Crazy week. Anyway, This is the one area that I am horrible at. I was always very intimidated by SEO. But the way Kelby put it, I completely understand what she is saying. Not so scary anymore! Thank you both so much!

By: AngEngland

AngEngland — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:29:59 +0000

@Dana – The only post I would reconsider the title on is “How I Save” – How you save what? Money? On Groceries? For Retirement? For college? You will be more likely to capture a reader via Google if you narrow your focus.

@Genna – Writing for yourself is perfectly fine. Just realize that your search engine traffic will suffer if you do. If you WANT people to find you via Google, you have to at least title your posts for Google. Many bloggers don’t care when it comes to a personal blog, and so they don’t.

@Ginny – SEO basics are so easy to apply yourself I too would be hesitant to invest a lot of money in hiring someone else to do it for you on a regular basis. In a highly competitive niche it might be worth it, but for most people, no.

@Chris – Thanks! I would hope that my blog posts here are easily understood and good quality reading. Yet I also have well over a thousand visitors per month via Google and search engines. You can definitely do both.

@Dominique – Freshening up old posts with better titles and maybe adding subtitles can be a GREAT way to catch Google’s attention. If you don’t have the traffic you think you should, I would look first to titles on your old posts.

By: Dominique

Dominique — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:18:49 +0000

I’m thinking I should go back and change some of those early blog post titles of mine!

By: Dominique

Dominique — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 04:22:12 +0000

When I started blogging, I was trying to think up clever titles and leads like I used to do for the newspaper–puns, wordplay, etc. were the rule of the day at the papers. As I blogged more over time, I discovered I had much better results driving traffic to my site when I made sure that locational words were part of my titles and first graphs and photo file names (I get a lot of my traffic through searches looking for specific Midwest locations). My titles might not be that exciting these days, but something like “Frankfort, Michigan, beach in winter” will bring me more traffic that something clever designed to fit in a certain width column.

By: Chris McLaughlin - @Suburban_Farmer

Chris McLaughlin - @Suburban_Farmer — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:08:04 +0000

I love the part about “not compromising the quality of your post” ! When I first started writing on the web, i was hearing a lot about stuffing SEO everywhere in the post…I resented the way it destroyed my work. It made the writing ugly; and quite frankly, I don’t write to make it ugly. I’m loving this more practical approach to online writing and am thrilled that our SEO expert, Angela had another SEO guru write this guest post.

Here’s where you’ll find your answers.

By: Ginny (MAD21)

Ginny (MAD21) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:59:07 +0000

I’m deferring this post to tech-savvy hubby who says:

Everyone should be aware that there are lots of shysters out there that tout themselves as “Optimizers” who can “guarantee” to increase your search engine rankings. They should not be trusted. While they might be legitimate, you have to be careful because if they use unscrupulous methods, or Google thinks you are gaming the search algorithm, Google will ban your site, and you will essentially disappear from the net. Google treats their search algorithm to be highly secret, and they constantly battle against those who are trying to spoof them unfairly.
Advice like this column is really the best way to help your rankings.

We tried the last few posts and they actually ranked number one with the following terms:
lock net stolen
fingerprint friday waiting
Help I’m Urkel

However, remember that Google will show rankings differently to different people, so it has learned about our search habits, and is trying to guess intent of our searches.