What is SEO and How it Helps to Drive Traffic to Your Blog?
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of maximizing the volume or quality of traffic to a web site/ blog from search engines via “natural” or un-paid some time called “organic” or “algorithmic” search results.
SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search or industry-specific search which help you get traffic from a search engine to your site/blog ultimately provide your website a web presence.
SEO include study of how Search engine works and rank pages in search results and then optimize your site to get FREE organic traffic from these search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. You may out source your SEO task to SEO consultant firms or you might be doing it by your own.
There are two sort of SEO means available,
- White Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO
We will only study about White Hat SEO as these are the legitimate or suggested ways to optimize your site for search engine. Search engines incorporate these for crawling. Black Hat SEO includes spamming, link farming and keyword stuffing in a website which may leads to a complete BAN from a search engine if they found you are using any such way to affect the search results.
How to optimize your site for Search Engines?
Optimize posts
By optimizing posts we mean you are writing search engine friendly content. You can include keyword related to your blog niche and you can also write an article keeping in mind the keyword people use to search information realted to your blog niche. Tell me if you need to search for the best weight loss clinic in your city, say delhi, then how you will search it and which keywords or phrases you will use to find the desired results. Its very simple you will type “Best Weight loss clinic in delhi” to find the information. So if your site niche is “Weight Loss” then to optimise your site for this targeted search result you will write posts using keyword “best weight loss clinic in delhi” in it couple of time so when search engine bots will crawls your site they will get this information and mark your site for these keywords or phrases.
Optimize Images
To optimize images for search engines traffic the only thing you need to care about is its “alt text”, it provide information to a search engine what this image is all about. Image name may be DSC089.jpg but if you tag it with a alt- text “weight loss ” then search engine would understand it as a image about “weight loss” and serve it when people will search about an image related to ”Weight Loss”.
Incoming links to your site
For a good page ranking your site must be linked by other peer sites in your niche having good page rank with the anchor text for which you are optimizing your site. For example if some site in my niche link my site with my name Shanker Bakshi then it will not earn a good ranking for me but if my site is about making money online and that site link me on a anchor text “make Money online” then search engines will give proper weight-age to this link and if several sites with good page ranks link back or refer my site in their content with the anchor text “Make Money Online” then it will send a clear indication to search engines that my site is about make money online and if people type the keyword “make Money online” in search bar possibly search engine will display my site in SERP ( Search Engine Result Page)
To understand thorughly the subject of link building and PageRank read my following articles on the subject;
- What is page rank – everything you want to know about google search explained?
- What is Link Bait and why you should care about it?
For better search of keywords related to your blog niche these sites are useful;
Tools to manage your blog SEO
WordPress Plugins
Well if you think you can’t handle SEO stuff yourself then you can simply install some plugins which will help you manage your SEO work automatically. I am giving you here two most talked about SEO Plugins for WordPress blog;
This is a must install plugin from the point of view of managing your site SEO. It bacially takes care of following three things
- Automatically optimizes your posts titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want
So if you are not a code geek then you should install it and forget about everything after filling certain parameters during installation and if you are a advance user you can tweak this pretty thing a little further to work better.
Read following post for further understanding of this plugin;
2. Robots Meta
Search engine crawls every page on your site, but we need not to index each and every page on our site thats because it will create duplicate content, you only need to index your content and not all the pages, like your login page, admin pages etc. Here is what this plugin dose;
- Disallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content.
- Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
You can direct search engine which pages you want to index and which you want to leave with the help of this plugin.
SEO Themes
There are designers who design themes for your WordPress blog including features of search engine optimizations and with the options available in these themes you can manage SEO of your blog. I can suggest you these two much talked about SEO themes
I am running this blog on Thesis theme, after switching from my previous badly coded theme to thesis I can see much improvement in search engine traffic, it just a month back I changed to this theme and I hope it will do better in future.
Here is a step by step guide from expert Double Mule on how you can optimize thesis for Search Engines.
Guys over VK Labs claims their WordPress theme tweaked to maximize SEO for your WordPress blog or niche site. its a SEO ready WordPress theme for users who seek for an inexpensive and straight forward way to publish niche content web sites. The theme as they say has been so designed that it target the best possible rank in search engine Google.
SEO Software
Many of you may have heard about Jeff Johnson SEO Blog software, (well thats what he call it ). according to Jeff this SEO software can drive tons of free traffic to your blog, Here is my detail post on it;
Free traffic getting SEO WordPress Software from Jeff Johnson
Hope the tools and information given above will help you understand SEO better and help you getting traffic to your blog. after All this FREE traffic from Google is what we blogger always aimed at.
7 Responses to “What is SEO and How it Helps to Drive Traffic to Your Blog?”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Tweets that mention What is SEO and How it Helps to Drive Traffic to Your Blog? | Shanker Bakshi dot Com -- Topsy.com - [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by shankerbakshi. shankerbakshi said: RT @ShankerBakshi: What is SEO and How it Helps ...
A very description article about SEO. I would like to mention it here that there is a third type of SEO know as “Blue Hat SEO”. If you google it, i’m sure you will find it. Just give it a try and tell us what you think about it.
Search engine traffic is the most important according to me & according to all professional bloggers.Most blog owners report 70% traffic from search engines so it’s wise to optimize your pages for SEO.
Wonderfule written post for a newbie like me..
I’ve gulped down every little bit of post…
thanks, i’ve saved this post for future use..
Cheers
Chris
SEO is extremely important, thanks for sharing this info with us. Its very useful for beginners who are just getting into SEO.
SEO, a proven system & technique to help you move up in major search engines, to get more traffic to your website and increase your profit!
I will be linking this post from my blog. SEO is big thing, this is only tip of it.
How to Calculate PR in google and alexa