If you start publishing content on the internet through a website or blog, one of the terms you’ll come across fairly quickly is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s an area that should get some attention from every blogger or content creator.
Search engines such as Google and Bing use automated programs to “crawl” the web, indexing web pages. Based on what is found, they deliver search results to folks who are making queries for a particular topic. Search Engine Optimization is the practice of ensuring that your website or blog is displaying content in a manner which makes it easy for search engines to find and using methods so that your website will rank higher for the terms you want.
We’ll be exploring a few basic SEO techniques over the next few weeks. A good place to start is to talk about keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that you expect people to use when searching, so you’ll want to use those words and phrases on your blog. A great first step is to make sure that your blog post titles (and the title for the blog itself) contain keywords. Sometimes there is a tradeoff between a vague and enticing headline to draw readers in vs. one that contains keywords for long-term search results.
Another place where keywords can boost ranking is in the post URLs themselves. Using keywords as part of the post’s permalink (such as http://www.socialphototalk.com/tweet-photos-smugmug-twitter/) will boost the ranking over a generic URL such as post_id=123.
There’s a couple basic SEO keyword tips for you… next time we talk SEO we’ll talk a bit about how keywords relate to tags (of the HTML variety).
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