Basic SEO Techniques for Bloggers!

Hey Beauties! Welcome to another post about blog design! Today I've decided to share something really simple with you, Search Engine Optimization. You might already be thinking this isn't really simple Krystal considering I don't know what it is. Search Engine Optimization in its simplest form is when web crawlers (spiders) index your pages to find the most relevant information to post on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The things that I will describe to you in this post will help increase your Search Engine Optimization allowing spiders to be index your page easier and allowing you to be closer to the first link that people see when they search for things on Google, Bing or Yahoo. While SEO is very basic there are also more advanced elements to it, for this post I will just be sticking to the minor things you can change or enhance on your blog to fully expose your blog to spiders and search engines and increase that Search Engine Optimization.

TITLES! One of the easiest things for bloggers to do is to title your posts properly. When making titles its important to think about what the spiders will pick up. Its also important to think of what people will search in Google in order to find posts. For example, if I'm writing a post on the Naked 2 Palette, I may title the post Urban Decay Naked 2 Eyeshadow Palette Review instead of Naked 2 Review. Most people will search for products by brand and by name of the products. Its also important to know that many people may be searching for reviews and swatches where makeup is concerned. If you have these 'keywords' in your titles spiders will pick those up and index your pages higher in the search engine. Another things to remember is to keep your titles short and concise, usually you want to keep your titles under 70 characters, but usually about 50 characters is ideal!
IMAGES! Probably one of the most important things I've learnt from my Internet Marketing Class is the use of images for web pages and for blogs. Did you know you can tag your images? Did you know you can title your images? I certainly didn't! When doing images (via blogger) all you have to do is upload your image onto your Blogger post, click the image and select properties and you will get something that looks like the window below. You should ALWAYS be 'alt tagging' your images. These Alt Tags allows spiders to pick up your images and index them in the 'image' sections of search engines. Simple right. Make sure that when your doing your title tags and alt tag's that again you make them something that people are going to search. For this post I have titled the image 'SEO Basic's for Bloggers' because that's what my post is called and if people were to type that in my image hopefully would come up. I also used the alt tag 'search engine optimization' because if people search that phrase my image should also appear in the image section. It is important to remember however that spiders don't crawl images to put them in search engines, they ONLY crawl the title and alt tags because spiders only crawl TEXT!

LINKS! Did you know that links are also super important to have on your webpage and blog? Here's why, spiders crawl links, they crawl from page to page to page gathering information to index in search engines. Thus, having more links really benefits your blog! It's also important because the more sites that have your blog linked on them the more spiders are coming across your links meaning that your blog is more relevant. This mean's that spiders will be much more likely to find your website and index it near the top of a search engine. When using links its first important to make sure all the links on your blog work, wither they are text links or image links. Its also important to think about where your links are posted, if you get the chance to have your blog link posted on someone's else's blog or web page this increases your SEO and makes you more noticeable on search engines. Another really important thing to think about for your own blog is to make sure you're linking back to your old posts. While these post's might not be the best you've ever had or you don't want to share them, its a really good idea to share because again these are things that spiders are going to want to index.
BODY TEXT! Have you noticed in my post body how many times I've used the words: URL, SEO, links & search engine optimization? Well there's a reason. Using keywords or key phrases in your post body mean that when spiders go searching through your text they are going to pick up on all of those. This means that the information the spiders gather will go to the appropriate search engine page. For example, if I made this post and didn't include the words SEO or search engine optimization then the spiders would have no idea that this post was related to those topics. This means that the spiders wouldn't be able to index my blog post or page in the correct location in a search engine. So I guess what I'm trying to say it make sure you are using a keyword or key phrase several times when your writing your web page or blog content. But make sure that you aren't over using those key phrases or words so that you're readers don't become annoyed or even really notice it.
TAGS & LABELS! Here is probably one of the biggest mistakes I see from bloggers, I'm even guilty for this. Have you ever want on a blog and seen a post that had 20 tags? Well do you know when you add in that many tag's it really doesn't make a difference in if people find your posts or blog in general. This is because spiders don't crawl tags or labels or even look at them. There more interested in the content that's actually on the page! I'm not saying that tag's can't help you because they can. You can use tag's to break down your blog into categories or organize posts. But when its some to search engine optimization spiders don't care if you have three tags or thirty tags. Lots of tag's just mainly clog up your post footer and make your blog look less professional. Trust me I've learnt the hard way!
Those are just a few of the basic search engine optimization basic's that I have learnt from other bloggers and from my Internet Marketing class. I think these are all pretty basic things for bloggers to do to help improve there chances of having great SEO. If you have any questions regarding SEO or any of the things mentioned in this post feel free to leave me a comment below. If you have any suggestions to improve SEO please also leave those below as I will be doing a followup post to this one as I learn more and more things about SEO!