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We’ve covered the basics of SEO — why you need it, some ways to get it and I challenged you to work on getting some back links from higher PR blogs. I did not work on that as much as I had intended to (you know about intentions and the road to hell, right? Well, my foot is planted firmly on it )

Let’s just see how my little bit worked.

Last week, I had 3 pr1 links and 37 pr0 links on my graph. Today, my 1-20 results graph shows 4 pr1 links and 36 pr0 links, so I’ve moved a PR0 up to a PR1 — that’s at least in the right direction!

How did you do?

I’ve been reading many different websites lately (not so much on purpose, but they just seem to be popping up) about building readership and keeping readers on your blog. Maybe that’s on a lot of people’s minds lately — with the worldwide economy like it is, perhaps we’re all looking and hoping to find ways of making an extra dollar or two along the way. Anyway, back to my subject of reading ….

I found a website that has free e-books that had a couple of books on SEO and one that particuarly caught my eye was Traffic Strategies for Your Website I’ve downloaded it, but haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.

I also stumbled a blog post about using contests to drive traffic to your website that’s very well written over at Blog Extreme Makover. You should definitely read this article before beginning a contest on your site. And by the way, although contests take a lot of planning and forethought, they are a pretty good way to get some new traffic. Think long and hard about the things you want people to do to qualfiy for entry, though. I’ve seen some where the hoops you were required to jump through for the gain you had the chance of winning were just not worth it.

While we’re on the subject of contests, today is the last day to enter Turnip of Power - Social Networking’s contest — lots of great prizes in the mix there, so don’t miss out!

And then, from Mixx, this post at Internet Marketing came across my inbox that has links to his top 10 copywriting tools for SEO. That’s a pretty comprehensive list and he’s one-upped me on publishing it as that was going to be part of this post — oh well, saved me some typing

Now don’t be shy about telling us how you did with your SEO challenge! I’m quite sure you did better than I did

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We’ve talked about keywords, meta tags and alt tags and title tags in your posts and on your site, but there’s one more key to achieving SEO totality.

Of course, I’ve left the hardest for last. This one is going to take planning and forethought on your part because it’s key to achieving your goal — listing on page one of Google (or any search engine’s) search results page for your chosen keywords.

Ok, I know you’re chomping at the bit to know just what this last mountain you have to climb is. You’re ready to reach Mohamed, so let’s get on with it.

Back links.

I’ve recently read a couple of articles on back link strategies that involve commenting on “do follow” blogs (which this is one in case you don’t already know it).  One is “Link Building With Comments on Dofollow Blogs” written by Layne at Reward Rebel in which she makes a couple of salient points that many of you don’t keep in the forefront of your minds when commenting. The one that’s most important in my mind is to leave them on blogs that are in your niche.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have back links from sites that are RELEVANT to your subject and keywords. In other words, your “competition”! I’m almost scared to admit it, but leaving your comments here doesn’t do much for you in the way of relevance because this blog is so all over the place with keywords that I have no niche — be that as it may, I hope my admission hasn’t shot me in the foot and run all of you off. It would be awfully lonely in here without you!

Atniz has written a post on “How to Value Dofollow Back Links” that further illustrates this point. She’s taken quite a hard-line approach to finding relevant sites and working methodically to improve her positioning in the search results. And she’s getting there! She’s got a PR of 2 for her main page. Her posts aren’t ranked, though and I think that has to do with her permalink structure which is a point I should have covered before and didn’t (so sue me).

There is a tool you can use called Backlink Checker that will check the back links to your site and tell you what the page rank and Alexa rank of the sites that have them is. There are several other tools on that web page that you might find useful as well — a keyword suggestion tool, a text link value tool and a PR Checker. Here you can see my first 19 results. You can see that I don’t do such a great job of getting back links :/

Besides this list, it also produces this graph so you can tell at a glance how many of what ranking back links you have. If you’re into statistics about your blog, you’ll find this to be quite interesting.

Having quality inbound links to your site (back links) are one of the cornerstones of the site ranking algorithm that Google uses.

Another tool you may find useful is Google’s tool that finds all the sites that link to a page that doesn’t exist on your site. Why should you care about that? Well, because people who *MIGHT* just click that link are taken to a 404 page and you don’t get that visitor, PLUS the LINK DOESN’T COUNT. Asking the site owners to fix the link just might mean the difference between PR2 and PR3 at the next update.

So, here’s your homework. Read the articles I’ve given you — c’mon now, they’re both short so quit complaining! Now find the highest PR dofollow blog you can and leave a GREAT comment on it (no spammy one-liners allowed) — think about saying something with a couple of your keywords or a long-tail keyword included.

Do this every day for the next five days and let’s meet back here and compare notes…what do you say? Are you game? I’m double-dog darin’ ya.

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Gosh don’t we all love to see pictures in posts? They really can juice up one, can’t they?

Pictures are pretty powerful draws to your readers. They not only illustrate what you’re writing about, they can entertain, enlighten, awe, inspire and drive SEO to your post.

“What’s that you say? A picture can give bring me Search Engine Optimization?” Yes, it can. Now I hope you’re saying “Tell me more!” (cause I’m gonna whether you said it or not )

Ok, let’s say you’ve written this absolutely riveting review of Quantum of Solace sort of like Ken Armstrong did. You’ve found this stunning picture on the web and you’re going to use it in your post to illustrate what a fab film this is. It’s a publicly distributed image, so you’re allowed to use it.

So you go to your handy dandy image upload icon and find your image, but wait just a minute before you click the “Insert into Post” button if you will. Do you see the field called “Title”? Type in a good title here. It needs to be as good as the title to your post is (something I’m notoriously bad at accomplishing, so you’re on your own as to how to write good titles). You can also write something in the Caption area — I usually don’t because I don’t particularly care for how WordPress handles captions, but it won’t hurt anything if you do. Then, see that box called “Description”? Type in some of your better keywords in there.  Ok — that’s good — choose the alignment and size and NOW click the “Insert into Post” button.

Great! Now you have an awesome photo on your post that’s doing a bit of extra work because you’ve included those keywords in the description and given it a meaningful title. You can even see your handiwork by hovering your mouse over the image, but even better they are where they will be read by the bots that scope out your site every time you update it. Ok, so it took you a bit of mental exercise to think up a fantastic title and 30 seconds to type in the keywords in the description area, but it’s going to be so worth it! I promise!

But you say “I’m not using WordPress, so how do I, a lowly non-WordPress blog platform user accomplish the same thing?”

Well, it’s a bit more typing for you, but just as easily accomplished, I promise.

If your blog platform allows you to view the HTML of your page, you’re going to want to edit that. You will add the title element to your image’s HTML along with the alt tag. Don’t forget your size elements (to help with your page load) and then you’re done!

<title="Pictures are worth SEO" src="http://eyespi20.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/qos3.jpg"
 alt="A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words As Well As SEO" width="500" height="398" />

There is a plug-in called SEO Friendly Images (which I actually have installed, but not configured) that’s supposed to make this a bit less painful, but from what I’m seeing in the configuration instructions, it just pulls in your post title and adds that to the file name of the picture. In my opinion, that’s not going to get the same action as my instructions above will from the bots. For one thing, your file name has to be something and I don’t know about you, but I tend to name mine stuff that really only means something to me. Like the screen shot above is named QOS3.jpg — what’s that going to mean to a bot even coupled with my post title? It’s the equivalent of making las vegas hotel reservations through Priceline as opposed to making them through the hotel’s reservations number. It’s a bit more work to go through Priceline, but you get more bang for your $$, right?

Ok — now go forth and optimize!

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For the new blogger or web entrepreneur, all this talk of SEO has to be bewildering. If you’re like me, you are reluctant to expose just how ignorant you are of this paramount subject, so just kind of sit back and keep your eyes and ears open until the light dawns. Well, here you go people - I shine the light of knowledge on just what SEO is and why YOU want it.

First, the basics — SEO stands for search engine optimization. But I can hear you saying “Um, OK, but I still don’t know what that means, and just what does that entail?” and “why do I want it?”

Search engines are the central nervous system of the web. They carry information about who’s who and what’s what from browser to browser. You type into your search window at Google, Yahoo Search, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile (or pick your favorite) the words or phrases for things you want to look up on the web. A page is returned with a list of websites and blogs that pertain to what you’re looking for.

These pages are indexed by the search engine algorithms to return only those pages most relevant to your search and in order of most-to-least relevant based on those algorithms.

You want to be listed in these results so that you get visitors, customers or subscribers depending upon what your website is about. So optimizing your website or blog for search engine inclusion is what SEO means and what you want to do unless you don’t WANT people to find your website. And if that’s the case, you can stop reading now and move on.

In order to see just how the pieces of SEO work, let’s pretend we’re creating a webpage that’s going to sell widgets to people to use on their blogs and websites.

It’s a good idea to see what the “competition” does with their webpage and how they come up in the search engines, so let’s give Google a spin to see what comes up now for our chosen “product”.

We’ll use “magic widgets” for our search term because that’s a term we’ve heard our customers use a lot.

What comes up is this:

See, even though the exact term “magic widgets” isn’t in the first result title or even the description underneath the title, the website owner has so optimized his page for this particular search term that it comes up before the one that DOES include the term in it’s title!

How did he do that?

Well he did a number of things. All of them are things you can do too and here’s how.

He’s done a search on keyword and keyword phrases which you can do also using Google’s Keyword Tool or one of the other keyword tools available on the web (free ones!), he’s entered the word “widget” and seen the results of that. He’s then used those most relevant key words and phrases on his site in various ways.

One of the ways he’s used them is with the meta tags on the pages on his site. Meta tags are little snippets of code that help tell the robots (or bots) sent out by the search engines what the page is about and what kinds of things it should find there. Many web tutorials are leaving off meta tags stating the bots no longer look at these, but my evidence points otherwise. While the search engines may not return entirely your meta description or return searches from your meta tags and meta keywords, they do look at them and then plumb the depths of your pages looking for matches. Having those matches on the page confirms to the bot that your page is for real and it goes on to use these and other factors such as back-links, keyword density and page reads to determine your rank or authority.

Meta tags include:

• Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.

• Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.

• Meta Keywords: This tag lists your main keywords and keyword phrases. if your site is not a niche site (i.e. the bots aren’t going to find much mention of these keywords on your pages), it’s probably  not worth your time to implement.

To implement the Meta Description tag, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your index page you will want to put the following:

<META Name=”description” content=”Everything you ever wanted to know about magic widgets from coding them to implementation”>

Meta Keywords should be limited to twenty-five words or phrases. To implement the Meta Keywords tag, again, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your web page, you will put the following (but use your own results of your keyword search):

<META Name =”keywords” content=”magic widgets, widgets, superior widgets, website widgets”>

And to implement the Meta Robots tag, still between <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your web page, put the following ONLY IF YOU DO NOT WANT THIS PAGE INDEXED BY THE ROBOTS.

<META Name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

You would do this on pages such as your about page as an example. While this method of excluding robots is effective a far better way of telling them to keep off is to use a robots.txt file in the root of your website. This will list the pages you don’t want indexed and is far easier to keep up with than individual pages and tags.

Putting keywords into meta tags isn’t the only use of them. You should also be using your keywords within the articles and text you have on your site. Having them sprinkled liberally throughout your article will alert the robots that your page is indeed very relevant to those terms, thereby giving your site a higher “score” and move it up in the ranks of sites to return when those particular terms are employed.

Besides having keywords, your site should also employ links to other sites. Having links and being linked to give you “authority” in the eyes of the search engines. That being said, you don’t want to have too many links as that kicks in a negative side in the search engine algorithms.Remember, this is about OPTIMIZING for search engine results. More is not always better young Jedi.

There are two “types” of links that you can use: “dofollow” and “nofollow”. These work a lot like the robots meta tag exept they only apply to that particular link. Your USERS will always be able to click the links you provide and be whisked away to whatever website you’re sending them to further instruction or to see the source of your information, so what you’re really doing with those tags which you will be putting in the link itself is telling the robots if they should also follow the link or not. Including these tags either pass along “link love” or withhold it. Sending someone to Wikipedia for more information on a particular subject might be a “nofollow” link, but sending them to Turnipofpower.com, a recognized expert in SEO and social networking would definitely qualify for “dofollow”. To set these, when you set up your link, to make it a dofollow you really don’t have to do anything, to make it nofollow you would do it like this:

<a href=”http://www.wikipedia.com rel=”nofollow”>Wikipedia</a>

If you’re a blogger, there are plug-ins you can use that will convert all your tags one way or the other or allow you to set some dofollow and others nofollow. Speaking of Turnip, he has a mini-tutorial on doing just that over at his site, so do pop over there to read up on dofollow versus nofollow and how to set up your site to use them properly.

There is a boat load more to learn about SEO and this article has already gone on long enough, so we’ll stop here for today. I’ll go into more things in a later article that will include using images for SEO and how to find and use articles on the web to improve your rankings.

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