Increasing blog traffic – search engine optimisation tips

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Lots of traffic these days comes from word-of-link, but if someone is searching for pages with your topic, the engines need to be able to recognise them properly.

 

Badly described pages are easily missed by search engines.

 

When search engines index your pages they read through the text searching for key phrases. So always think in phrases; the same phrases should feature throughout your title, body text, key-words and alt image text.

 

Now when I say phrases I don’t mean pars of copy, just use the words which are most likely to be used by punters when they search for a site or topic like yours.

 

Think like someone looking for a site like yours. How would they describe it to a search engine?

 

The title of your page is important. Think of it as the headline. Most engines and directories prioritise keywords that are found in the title tag. The title is what the search engines usually display to a searcher on a results page, so think hard about which words will attract their attention.

 

The ‘alt’ image text displays in the box where your image would be when people have images turned off and it improves some search engines finding your blog. Although it is normally hidden behind an image, it is still visible to the search engine, so include your key phrases in that too.

 

The alt image text is also a good place to hide some common misspellings of any of the key phrase words, include these in the tags as well.

 

Just mentioning a certain phrase once and nowhere else in the page will do nothing for your search engine rankings for that phrase.

 

So right now I’m trying to say the words increasing blog traffic and search engine optimisation, just like my title, somewhere in the text so it will add more weight to this page’s phrases.

 

Obviously it’s not possible to use the same phrase as your title all the time without looking like a complete fool, but if you can sneak them in, do.

 

The more times you repeat the phrase the better, but don’t go overboard, or the search engines may blacklist your site for spam-like content and exclude it from results. I wouldn’t go over, say, 10 repeats of the same word in your keywords.

 

Oh, and search engines find it hard to index sites which use Flash, Java or Image maps as the sole means of moving between pages. Frames on a page confuse them, as they may only be reading the navigation frame, not the content. So watch out for that stuff.

 

So yeah, don’t be lazy and label your posts correctly and consistently and you’ll be set.

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Tags: blog hits, increasing blog traffic, increasing hits, internet, search engine optimisation, search engines, tips, traffic, web