Sarah Fudin works in community relations for George Washington University’s online MPH programs, which provides prospective students the ability to earn a online Masters of Public Health. Outside of work Sarah enjoys running, reading and Pinkberry frozen yogurt.
Bloggers have their work cut out for them. Not only do they have to craft high-quality, original content, but they have to also make sure their blog is easily indexed by search engines so that readers will be able to access that high-quality, original content. The art and science of optimizing your content for search engines is known as search engine optimization, or SEO. It is usually highly misunderstood and oft-maligned, but it is a legitimate practice, and every blogger should be aware of its fundamentals so that they don’t get left out in the cold when people are searching the web for good content.
Search engine optimization is not inherently an evil practice, though many “black-hat” SEO consultants have given it a negative connotation. SEO can be thought of as making your content easily understood by computers as well as people and producing content with that end in mind. Your audience is primarily other humans, of course, but keep in mind that another part of your audience consists of algorithms developed by Google and other search engines. Therefore, SEO can be thought of as writing content that is clean and easy enough for both people and search engine algorithms to understand — that’s all.
Basic On-Page SEO Practices
First of all, think about what you’re writing about and make sure your headline and headers are topical. Think of what your content is trying to communicate and what people might be searching for if they should find it. You should make sure to use appropriate words in your posts and headlines. It can helpful to use hobby- or industry-specific jargon as well. Say, for example, that you’re writing about video games. People won’t go to Bing or Google and type “Stuff about video games”; they’ll type in the specific name of the game they’re interested in followed by some keywords. “Our review of Halo 4” is a better headline than “HALO 4 IS AMAZING” because the former is closer to what a reader would search for (e.g. “review of Halo 4”). It can help to just stop for a moment and think about the people out there searching for content and to try to think about the things you yourself type into search engines when you’re looking for something in particular.
Take this example, referring to University of Southern California’s Master of Social Work program that offers a unique Military Social Work program:
You see that the word “military” is heavily utilized, with strong contextual links to the words around it. The breadcrumb navigation, the sidebar, and the header on the page are all matching: “Military Social Work.” This increases the likelihood of a search engine users typing in “military social work” and finding that particular page because the search engine algorithm was able to read that page and understand it’s about military social work.
It can be very important to use semantic HTML as well. Make sure you read some basic primers on HTML; it’s not difficult, and it can really change the overall SEO profile of your blog. For example, instead of using “<b>” tags to bold a heading, you should be using heading tags to delineate important separations of content. In the screenshot example, “Military Social Work” is using an “<h1>” tag (which stands for Heading1) and CSS to indicate the style and appearance rather than making a large graphic image of the words (which cannot be read by search engines, as they typically only understand text).
These are some things you can do on your page and in your post. These are called “on-page” optimizations. There are also other things you can do called “off-page” optimizations to help boost your blog’s performance on search engines.
Basic Off-Page SEO Practices
The first thing you can do is make sure that your content is easily shared by your readers. There are a variety of plug-ins for blogging platforms that install “share” buttons for various social networks. Sharing your content with popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ is very important (particularly Google+ because +1s from a variety of people will actually influence your blog’s performance on Google’s search rankings).
If you write good enough content and build a following, hopefully you can get other bloggers to link to you. If they do, encourage them to use appropriate HTML tags (alt and title, specifically) to link back to your content with strong keywords that are related to your content. Using the same example above, if an influential game blogger liked your review of Halo 4, you could ask him or her to link to it with the alt tag of “Halo 4 review” in her link on her page. You can build reciprocal relationships with peers by returning the favor and making sure you link to other people’s good content with appropriate HTML tags. If they pay any attention to their web analytics, they’ll notice and be thankful for it.
Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be scary. These are just a few simple tips that you can utilize to help boost your search rankings and make your content more easily found. As you get into the habit of performing basic SEO best practices, you can increase your knowledge and skill, and before you know it, you’ll be an SEO wizard!
Photo Credit: Flickr user SEOPlanter
