Creating A Successful Blog Part 3 - SEO

After choosing the niche and the blogging platform, the 3rd stage is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You need to optimize your blog, so you can get visitors to your blog. Without visitors, it doesn’t matter how well the content, your blog worth nothing. Therefore you optimize your blog to get those visitors you deserve.

Identifying Search Queries (Keywords)

Any SEO project should start with research. Before starting you need to identify the search queries for your site. But try to keep those queries as specific as possible. For instance if your blog is about Acne, try to go for queries such as “Acne Information Blog”, “Natural Remedies for Acne” etc. After deciding on the queries write them down.

Analyze the Keywords

You can analyze each keyword or query that is identified above by using the tools such as WordTracker and Keyword Difficulty Tool. These tools will help you to see the competition for the keywords you chose. Also, they will identify the number searches conduct per month. By properly analyzing your keywords and its usage over the Internet will help you to use the right keywords. 

Identifying the Competitors

By using your chosen keywords you can conduct a search. Then in the result identify the sites that are in the first page. Visit these sites and browse through. See what kind of information they provide and how the site is structured. After, you can use the Yahoo Site Explorer tool to identify the sites that link to your competitors. This tool is very helpful to identify the sources of the links and traffic of your competitors.

Onsite Optimization

After completing all the steps, now it is time to optimize your content. Here are the thinks you need to consider:

· Include keywords in your Title tag. That is title of your blog posts.

· Include keywords in

.

· Try to use your keywords within your posts.

· Make sure your URLs are search engine friendly. For example instead of having www.blog.com/?type=acne&remedies=natural, have it as www.blog.com/acne/natural_remedies.

· Remember to include keywords in images tag.

Building Links to Your Site

Now, you can start building links to your site. You can start with submitting to directories, which also will help you to get indexed faster. After that you can write articles and submit those articles to article directories. You can also submit your links to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Redit, etc.