The ABCs of SEO for Bloggers Part 2

Did you miss the first installment? See The ABCs of SEO for Bloggers Part 1.

Juice, as in Google Juice

A site’s reputation with Google is often referred to as its Google Juice. This silly term refers to the flow of authority from one site to another. When you link to a site you are essentially vetting that site as a reputable site and giving that site a little bit of Google Juice. When another site links to you, they are saying you have authority on whatever anchor text links to your site. Established sites with a high PageRank have a lot of authority with Google and transfer more authority when linking than new sites with little or no Google Juice to share.

Writing guest post for blogs is a great way to earn Google Juice and many bloggers appreciate the occasional guest post, especially if you are knowledgeable on a topic or can tell an entertaining story. In most cases guest bloggers are allowed a one or two line bio including a link or two, giving you a little bit of Google Juice. Keep in mind that very large sites are often inundated with guest post requests. Look to your peers and the up and comers in the blogging community for great guest posting opportunities.

Pro-Tip:

Srinivas Rao suggests using the bio-link to point to landing page instead of your site’s homepage, the page he links to offers a free 7 day e-course and weekly newsletter. This is a great way to not only build your site’s reputation with search engine’s, but to build your list, as well.

Kill Extraneous and Unrelated Keywords

A keyword is simply any word or words a reader types into a search engine that leads them to your site. Try to limit the number of keywords you focus on in each post or article, additionally the keywords should be closely related or just minor variations. Don’t include misspelled variations of your keywords, it simply makes you appear ignorant, Google already offers the correct spelling as an alternative for when users make mistakes. If you find that you have users arriving on pages that aren’t relevant to the keyword search, either update the content to make it useful for the reader, block the page from the search engines, or remove the content entirely. While it may sound counter-intuitive to discourage incoming traffic, if that traffic arrives with the cost of a high bounce rate, the long term payoff is building a reputation as a reliable resource.

Long-Tail Keywords

If you spend any time at all reading about SEO, you’re bound to read about chasing the long tail. All this means is instead of focusing on the few keywords with the most searches and therefore the most competition, you focus on more keywords with less competition. If you’re writing copy for a company that sells and repairs HVAC units within a certain geographic area, it makes much more sense to focus on air conditioner repair in [geographic area] than simply on the term air conditioner repair. With the first choice it’s likely you’ll be competing against companies with a local presence instead of every air conditioning repair shop that writes their web copy in English.

Spend some of your time writing articles that take advantage of the long tail theory. Don’t be afraid to revisit old topics with a slightly different angle. Just don’t focus on nearly identical posts for weeks on end. Intersperse your long tail posts with timely and highly interesting subject matter to avoid boring your subscribers and regular readers.

Minimize Your Site’s Load Time

Believe it or not site speed is a factor in how well you rank with Google. Self-hosted WordPress users, take a hard look at how many plugins you have bogging down your site. Use IsMyBlogWorking.com to figure out how long it takes your site to load. If it’s taking more than a couple of seconds, you probably need to install a caching plugin like W3TC or WP-SuperCache. If you are using a shared hosting plan and your traffic has been growing, it may be time to upgrade to a virtual private server or eventually a dedicated server.

If you’re serious about treating your blog like a business, you will have to invest in it. The investment comes either in the form of time you spent on self-education or money spent on hiring a professional who can help with issues like caching.

Michael Carnell, Peter Pollock, and Kat Robertson (abc order, no favorites) are three people I trust with issues like moving sites, adding setting up caching, and increasing site security. There are many others out there, these three were just top of mind.

While we’re talking about SEO and Site Load Times, do not use All In One SEO on your site if you are on a shared hosting plan. This plugin is extremely resource heavy and may cause you many headaches (some hosting providers will throttle your site, reducing the amount of traffic you can receive). The newest release of WordPress (3.3) now has many of the features already built in. There are also SEO friendly themes that provide the same functionality without the excessive resource use.

No Keyword Stuffing

When optimizing a post it may be tempting to overuse keywords. Try to keep the flow of language natural, use the keyword a couple of times in the opening paragraph, again in a header, and at least once more in the closing paragraph. The copy, or text of the post / article, shouldn’t seem forced. Search engines are used to sites that try add keywords to unrelated text and penalize them with lower ranking.

Never hide text by adding white text to a white background or black text to a black background. Don’t ever try to game the search engines, it’s a short term gain at best.

Original Content

Write your own content. Let’s start with the obvious, plagiarism is wrong. Not only that but Google does penalize for duplicate content and will move duplicate content further down in search results. Always keep your site map up to date.

The Panda Update

Familiarize yourself with the Google Panda update:

SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday: How Google Panda Changed SEO
video by SEOMoz

Quit Trying to Game the System

There are no shortcuts. Create high quality, enjoyable content, get links to your site (without buying, try guest posting), invest in good site design, make your content easy to share, and over time, your site’s rankings will improve in the search engine rankings.

Anything that tries to circumvent this process will eventually be weeded out by updates like Google Panda.

Next: The ABCs of SEO for Bloggers Part 3

Photo © Trish23 – Fotolia.com

Related posts:

1. The ABCs of SEO for Bloggers
2. Bloggers and Paid Text Links
3. Marketing Strategies Bloggers Should Know
4. How to Write Effectively for the Web
5. Blog Kharma