If you want your blog to get good traffic, you need to apply some Search Engine Optimization tricks to entice the search engine spiders to visit your blog and rank it higher in the results pages.
Many people avoid using SEO techniques because they think SEO is complicated and difficult. There are some simple things you can do, however, to help optimize your blog.
Keyword Research
Any kind of optimization needs to begin with keyword research. Keyword research is easy to do thanks to several online tools like Wordtracker or Google Keyword tool.
Simply type in a word or short phrase describing your business function or features. If you are selling doghouses, for example, type in “doghouses” and let the keyword tool go to work.
It will show you how often the word is searched for on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It will also list dozens of related keywords used in daily searches.
The next step in choosing keywords to optimize your blog is to choose the top five or so keywords and run a Google search on them to determine how much competition there is for each one.
If a keyword is searched for 1,000 times a day, but there are 4,000,000 websites showing in the search engine results for that particular word, you may want to consider a different keyword without quite so much competition.
By creating more specific keyword phrases, you can narrow down the search possibilities. Once you have your list narrowed down to about five keywords, it is time to start using them strategically in your blog.
Ideally, your main keyword should be in the domain name of your blog. If you already have an established domain name that doesn’t include your keywords, it doesn’t mean all is lost. There are several other places you can add your keywords to help optimize your blog for search engines.
Your post title: The search engine spiders will check you title first, so plug your keywords into your title as often as you can.
Your headings: Headings and subheads are also excellent places for your keywords to get picked up when your site is scanned.
Meta Descriptions and Meta Tags: Use your keywords in the Meta description and the Meta tags for your blog for additional SEO.