In the grand world of blogging and online marketing the term SEO gets bandied about quite a bit and most people have no clue what those three little letters mean, much less what SEO actually is. This isn’t unusual. Most buzz words are simply that, something for uniformed people to buzz about. I want to put this out there for you to better understand.
The best place to start is by explain what SEO does. it optimizes your site for search engines, both making it easy for them to look at your content and for searchers to access the information on your page. when they see the search engine results results pages or SERPs. Many bloggers either do nothing in the way of SEO or the rely on fairly useless plugins like the All in One SEO Pack. This plugin is the worst thing most bloggers can really do as it fills in what should be custom crafted fields with pitiful auto generated crap.
In the end there are things bloggers can do if they are serious about there blog as a long term business opportunity. First is make good use of keywords in page titles, post titles and page descriptions. Every blogger should do these things. Secondly is make sure you are using good tags and meta keywords. I personally turn all my tags into meta keywords through a script in my blog template. If it is good enough to tag it with, it is good enough to make it a keyword. Next is use your categories wisely, and more importantly is to turn the category into part of your permalink. The next big step is to take out the useless words in your permalink. This makes them shorter and more friendly to search engines, and to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck on keywords. Last but not least is your linking strategy. Posts should be linked to one another internally and where ever possible have an RSS feed for everything.
I know one of your thoughts is it is fine for Brad to bandy about all this advice, but it doesn’t look like he is doing it himself. Well you have a point, this blog isn’t doing everything I have suggested at the moment. If you look to some of my newer blogs they started off doing everything right, so I am not just talking out my arse. It takes time to integrate these features into existing blogs, but I am slowly working on it both from a theme stand point and from the content side and one of these days it will be finished and totally online for everyone to see.
