Expert: Daniel Scocco, Daily Blog Tips
#20 of 30
About the Expert
Daniel Scocco is owner and author of Daily Blog Tips, a blogger resource for simple but effective search engine optimization and promotion tips. Daniel started blogging as a hobby more than a year and a half ago and quickly found his voice and passion for it. Soon after, he quit his job inside a multinational company to dedicate himself exclusively to blogging and other Internet related projects. Daily Blog Tips, now five months old, is already generating 10,000 daily page views and 2,000+ subscribers and has been nominated for a 2007 Weblog Award under the “Best Web Development Blog” category. Daniel writes in such a clear, friendly and accessible manner that it is no wonder he has quickly become a popular read for many bloggers and web publishers. Chitika is pleased to have Daniel give seven tips for making content search engine friendly..
Content is surely king, but if people can not find your great content through search engines you might have trouble over the long run. Like it or not the majority of the Internet users start their navigation on Google; that is how they find most of the information they are looking for. Don’t get me wrong here, you should firstly write your content with humans in mind; people that write for search engines exclusively end up having very poor articles that are boring to read. That being said if you are aware of some basic SEO principles you can tweak your articles without affecting their quality.
Below you will find 7 ways to make your content more search engine friendly, check it out:
1. Use searched keywords: suppose you are writing an article about a funny picture that you found across the Internet. Would you rather title the article “What a funny image” or “What a funny picture”? From the reader point of view it is probably the same, but if you pick the second option you will maximize your chances of receiving search engine traffic since the term “funny picture” is 39 times more searched than “funny image”. You can research about keywords with Yahoo’s Overture service.
2. Focus on few keywords: it would be nice if you could write about several topics on a single article and rank well on search engines for all those topics. The reality if quite different. Make sure to focus on a single topic with every post; this will ensure that your are using keywords with consistency.
3. Use keywords on the title: the title of your posts is one of the most important factors on search engine algorithms. Ideally your title will contain the main keywords of your text and it will also be short and descriptive.
4. Use keywords on the right places: apart from using the keywords on the title of your posts you can also place them on strategical spots. Usually search engines give a higher weight to keywords positioned on those spots. Two strategical places that you can use are the beginning and the end of your posts.
5. Use the Alt and Title tags: whenever using images you should include both the ALT and the TITLE attributes. Those tags are used from search engines not only to identify images but also for keyword density purposes.
6. Make keywords bold and italic: if used correctly the bold and italic properties will not only make your content more structured and scannable, but they will also give a higher value to your keywords.
7. Use H2 and H3 headers: just like the last point using headers will make your content more readable while optimizing it for search engines. Search engines rely heavily on titles, headers and subheaders to determine what a web page is about so make sure that you are not neglecting them.