Start with SEO in mind to get more traffic to your blog
Recently, I started a blog at (http://cloudfex.com) to blog on topics like Windows Azure, Cloud Computing, .NET and any interesting technology news I receive in my mailbox. Before setting off to start this blog, I wanted to make sure I started off with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel a few months down the road. Doing it right the first time will give you more benefit as SEO is a time-driven process (your site benefit more when you do it earlier).
I started the blog around10 days ago on 19th March and here’s how I start my SEO planning (I’m just using simple SEO tips/tricks):
1. Determine the topic that I want to talk about and write down a list of them
It is important that we identify keyword that we wish to target. An example of keyword is what do you visualize your visitor will search on the search engine (SE) when trying to locate your site. This is also the same set of keyword you use to track your SEO progress (in this case, trying to be listed and climbing up the SERP (search engine result page).
In my case, the keyword I’ve selected are “Windows Azure”, “Cloud”, “Technology”, “Yizhe”
2. Start to select a good domain name. Your domain name has a strong significant on the type of content that exist on the site thus the search engine placed a huge emphasis on this area. For example, if you want to talk about sports, it’s best to have sports being part of your domain name (e.g. mysportsite.com, sports.com). If you are unable to get a domain with the keyword in it, you can also use it as a subdomain (sports.mysite.com)
3. Once you have your domain, you can start to install your own blogging software. I will skip the installation instruction but if you need information about installing Community Server on Windows 2008: http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/03/23/installing-community-server-on-windows-server-2008.aspx.
4. After installing it, it’s time to do some simple SEO on your site page. Firstly, choose a good title for your blog pages. In most blogging software, you can specify the following properties of your site:
- Title
- Meta Description
- Meta Keyword
- H1
These 4 properties are extremely important when the search engine crawlers search your site and try to figure out what content exist on it. When finding the content for the 4 properties, it is important to make use of keyword placement. For example, my blog site have the following:
Title:
Since I am targeting Windows Azure as my primary keyword, I have to make sure it is shown prominently on the title page of my landing page at (http://cloudfex.com)
I’ve also selected the following meta description:
Meta-Description is extremely important as it will be shown on the SERP and it should be a call-to-action statement to entice visitors to click on it. Your target keyword should also be in the meta-description as it is weighted heavily by the search engine.
Meta-Keyword are a set of keywords that search crawlers will identify and associate your site with those keyword. However, it isn’t being weighted heavily these days as most crawler will ignore this. But nevertheless, there’s no harm including it.
Lastly, do include your keyword in your H1 tag as the crawler will make use of H1 to find the topic that is being discussed on the page. In my case, this is my H1:
Once all of these is completed, it’s time to load up content onto the site. I’ll discuss this further in my subsequent post but here’s the 3 core tips that everyone should keep in mind.
1. The content is the only reason why your visitor is visiting your site. No amount of SEO can help your site if the content you write is not relevant to your target visitor group. Write good content and you will be rest assured that people will come to your site.
2. Try to get the crawler to reach your site.
To do so, the easiest way is to submit your site directly to the search engine.
http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html
Another interesting way to get your site crawler is to start asking your friends (especially those who owns blog that is very popular) to start linking to your site. Crawlers usually crawl sites that are popular more frequently thus the crawler will be directed to your site from your friend’s popular site. If you happen to own other website, do put links to your site too.
Furthermore, popular and reputable sites who provide you with in-bound links will help boost your ranking of your domain as search engines trust those site to link to reputable site too.
3. Submit your site to feedburner or blog aggregation site.
This is an important step as you will get a lot more viewership from those site. Keep your topic attractive and exciting so that people will click your URL. Blog regularly and start to build up your loyal friend. It is also important to ensure that things you blog have a follow up action such as revisiting your site later for updated news so that people will keep coming back.
For my experiment, I’ve managed to boost my ranking of my site [with my keyword] to the top ranking SERP result on search engine within a week with an average of 150-200 pages view and 50+ unique per day.
I’ll blog more about page specific SEO in the next post. Happy SEO-ing!