How Search Engines Read Your Site
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about being ‘seen’ by search engines. Many small businesses aim to be on the ‘first page of google’, and blogs can help.
Search engines work by sending out crawlers to index your site’s contents. Crawlers follow the links found on your site and enter your site into their search database based on text they find on your pages. This text is either found on your public pages, or the text keywords found in behind-the-scenes tags (including images).
The amount of your keywords found on your page, the more weight it has with search engines and the higher your ranking. You can find out the keywords relevant to your industry through google analytics or some research from Moz beginners guide to keyword research. You can also go back to the basics of getting started with blogging from an earlier post.
How Blogs Help
Search engines love blogs for many reasons. First, blogs are usually written in a simple format making them exceedingly easy for their crawlers to work through. There is no Flash or JavaScript standing in the way. Secondly, blogs give search engines exactly what they want – original content written in a natural way.
If your blogs are content rich and refer to the topics that relate to your keywords (and what else would you be writing about!) search engines will find you.
But be warned make the flow of your writing natural or search engines will punish you for ‘keyword stuffing’ (love that phrase!).
To help the search engines find you there are 3 key places where you should include your keywords every time you write a blog:
1) Title – e.g. Blog SEO for Small Business
The title of your blog post should include a keyword, but just be sure to keep your long-tail keyword under 70 characters. The title of your post will be a search engine and reader’s first step in determining the relevancy of your content, so including a keyword here is vital.
2) Body – e.g. keywords in blogs
You should mention your keyword at a normal pace throughout your post – that means you should include your keywords, but only in a natural, reader-friendly way. Search engines punish you if you have a post they believe is using keyword mentions as a way to rank for a particular keyword.
3) Images – e.g. blog for SEO
Blog posts shouldn’t only contain text for SEO purposes — you should also have images that help explain your content. But search engines don’t just look for images. Rather, they look for images with alt text. (You can figure out an image’s alt text by placing your cursor over an image. A small box will pop up that describes your image).
So what are you waiting for? Start blogging today – it’s not too late to join the 21 Day Blogging Challenge. Just message PurplePyjamas on Facebook.
PS: if you haven’t submitted your website to Search Engines – do it now …
For Google, you can submit it here:
http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/#
For Bing (and Yahoo), you can submit it here:
