Every webmaster, blogger, affiliate marketer and indeed all online entrepreneurs understand the importance of generating targeted traffic to your products or services on the net.
It’s for this simple reason that internet marketers do agree that traffic is the holy grail of internet marketing.
Now there are various ways you can generate traffic to your blogs. Some come with a price tag but there are a few that you can employ for free.
SEO is definitely one of these free ways. In this article I want to reveal the top free 4 blog SEO tactics that have produced outstanding results for me thus far.
Let’s be frank here. Blogging itself is one free way of generating traffic. Intergrating a blog in your business webiste could be a great way of attracting traffic to your site. That’s what attracted internet marketers to blogging a few years back. However, today with the proliferation of blogs, getting your blog content into the search engines now demands some extra work on your part.
This is where the blog seo tactics revealed in this article come into play. Maybe the subject of search engine optimization may have looked like rocket science to but that shouldn’t be!
Why pay someone else to do this when you can easily do it? Why try to immerse yourself in all the technical information trying to figure out how to optimize your blog pages to achieve higher rankings when you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly?
The truth is you can save money and still achieve some great results!
With SEO You Can Eat Your Cake And Still Have It!
Before I delve right in and reveal my 4 blog seo tactics let me point out a few reasons why you should implement blog search engine optimization.
Give or take at least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This means a good number of the traffic that will come to your blog come from the search engines.
Now let’s take this a little further. If you do a search on google.com right now you’ll receive a result in 3 columns. The first column across the top of the page, the second on the right hand corner abd the third just below the first top column but on the left. This column which you’re targeting with your SEO tactics, is called organic search results column.
Now apart from this third column the other two are paid listings. What it means is that for you to be on the top and right column you’ll need to part with some bucks! For example, let’s say it costs an advertiser just $0.5 dollar per click to be on these paid listings. If some 15,000 people click on that ad in a month, that advertiser will be spending close to $7,500 to be on that page.
So what does that mean to you? It simply means if you can securely push your blog or website right on top of that page you’ll be saving some $7,500! Can you now see that with seo you can truly eat your cake and have it?
So how about that? Ready for this?
Let’s begin.
1. Supercharge Your Title and Description Meta Tags:
By default the title and description of your blog are the title and description you enter in the admin general settings page. Leaving these “as is” will be doing a disservice to your blog’s search engine rankings. There is however a few things you can do to effectively enhance your blog’s ranking. You can manually do this by editing your blog theme’s header file. But the quickest and easiest way I’ve found is using the All In One Search Engine Optimization plugin! Using the plugin’s setting page, enter your desired “Title” and “Description” for your blog’s home page. Besides, before publishing any blog article, use the plugin’s option which appears within your “new post” page to optimize the article by entering a title and description for each post.
One powerful secret to employ here is to craft your title and description as you would a classified ad. Short but appealing and benefit laden. It should also be attention-grabbing so that your target audience will be drawn to it in the midst of the other search results. I must point out here is that the purpose of this tactic is not just about pushing your blog to the top of the search results but to ensure that once your blog is on the first page, people will actually click on your link and visit your blog.
2. Target Keywords/Phrases With Optimized Results:
You should know that optimized search results are simply the results you get whenever you do a search with quotes around your keywords. Search engine placements definitely has to do with keywords. However, just picking any keyword/phrase will not help you. It doesn’t matter how high the search volume for that keyword/phrase may be. You need a keyword/phrase that will effectively get you on the top of the search results without much ado. A keyword with optimized result will do this for you. First you need to generate a list of possible keywords from which you should select 5 to 10 keyword phrases. Then enter each of them into Google.com search box with quotes.
For example:
“blog marketing tutorials”
“free blog marketing tutorials”
“personal blog marketing tutorial free”
When you enter these phrases into google.com look at the search results. Are they within the range of 1000 to 5000? If the results are way too high, in the thousands or millions then it’s not the right phrase to target. Do this for all the keyword phrases you’ve selected until you get a keyword phrase that has anything between 1,000 and possibly 7,000 optimized results. Now target this keyword phrase and your blog post will make it on the first page of Google in time at all. The problem however is that this could be tasking and strenuous. But there is a solution. Here is a free tool that will remove the hard work and stress. Download here.
3. Help The Search Bots To Better Understand Your Content!
You definitely should know that search engines read your blog content differently from the way humans reads them. To help your blog on the search engines you need to guide the search bots a little in understanding the focus of your blog content by drawing their attention to specific words and phrases in your content. You can do this by using tags like <h2></h2> for your subheadings and also bolding your target keywords using <b></b>. As the bots reads your blog’s source code they will pick up these keywords and phrases as most important in your content. You can see how I’ve done this throughout this article! This simple tactic will help your posts rank high in the search engines for your target keywords/phrases.
4. Individually Submit Your Blog Posts To The Search Engines!
It’s true that with blogs you can easily ping update services once you publish a new post. As much as this is good you can also help your blog on the search engines by submitting every post you publish using a site like http://www.submitexpress.com. This site will submit your blog article to over 40+ different search engines and directories and over 35 different meta search engines! Take advantage of this with every post you publish and very soon your articles will be individually indexed in various search engines all over the net.
Bonus Tip
Just thought of adding this as a bonus 🙂 Probably you’re already using it, but if not go and implement it right now. What is that? Install the Google sitemap generator plugin. This plugin is a must for any wordpress blog. With this you can literally pull in the search engines and they will come rushing to index your every posts minutes after you publish them. The Google Sitemap Generator plugin is a must if you want to win with the seo battle! You can definitely use this in conjunction with #4 above!
There you have it my 4 invaluable blog SEO tactics. Step out today and try these simple tactics and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. You don’t have to hire a search engine optimization company or consultant. Save your money but get the results you’ve always wanted!
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