SEO and Blogging Basics- Why SEO Works

Blogging and SEO are inseparable. The blog is perhaps the defining website content, and blogs cover every imaginable subject on Earth. The trouble is that low grade SEO, or non-existent SEO in many cases, is an own goal for blogs. If people can’t find your blog, how do you expect to get read? SEO is a logical approach to a basic online issue, and it’s more of a science than anything else these days.

There are a lot of businesses around the world which are literally built on SEO. These are often online businesses, but many of them are “bricks and mortar” businesses, too. SEO is how their clients find them. This is the new Yellow Pages, more efficient and easier to carry around. For bloggers, it’s best practice to make absolutely sure that your blog is easily searchable using keyword phrases, the sort of terms people normally use to search.

Checking your own SEO as it is

There’s an easy way of checking your current SEO situation:

Try searching your own blog, using two or three key phrases from your text related to your subject matter.

How did you go? Did you:

• Find your blog instantly?
• Not find it at all?
• Find it down on Page 50 of the search results?

You’ll have noticed that some phrases are much better than others. You’ll also have seen that you got a lot of other sites on the top rankings. That’s SEO at work, and it’s what SEO is all about. The SEO keywords are the core issues when searching.

For bloggers, there are two major SEO issues:

• Blog content and subject matter
• The fact that many articles vary considerably and keywords may need some adjustment to make the individual blogs easier to find.

If you use WordPress, you’ll know their tagging options. WordPress uses tags as a default process for SEO purposes. Tagging is built in to WordPress specifically because the SEO process is so crucial to blogs. Convincing argument, isn’t it?

The other big issue is content. Search engines look for useful information, links and additional values. It’s like saying an encyclopaedia entry is more valuable to searchers than a Post-It note full of scrawl. SEO uses articles to provide high value relevant materials to improve search rankings. As a matter of policy, Google also uses content as a value indicator for its basic search algorithms.

Improving your SEO

There are various ways of improving your search engine optimization:

Content quality: This is a major issue for search engines, and relevance to search subjects is highly important.

Accurate, useful keyword phrases: This is basic, and you’ll need to put some thought into each blog piece for good tags.

Focusing your blog on critical core subjects: Some blogs cover far too many subjects for a search engine to consider the blog subject-specific. You may need to create another blog to help organize the subject matter, keeping your original blog for its basic subject matter.

Get help if you’re not sure what to do with your blog. It’s easy enough to get some professional assistance with your SEO. This also acts as training, explaining how specific SEO issues relate to your blog.