VeryBestSoftware.Net

Here’s another great article by Al, from Business.com. He is dealing with the very common issue new bloggers have: how to tell if my blogs needs search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization. It’s one of the biggest buzz terms of the new millennium, and with good reason: Online ad pennies are hard to come by. Every hit counts, and the best way for your site to get hits is to ensure that it shows up at or near the top of the first page of relevant search engine results.

As a blogger, there are any number of do-it-yourself SEO techniques that you can implement with little effort and know-how. After that, you should consider hiring one of the many companies that have sprung up over the past few years whose expertise lies in helping people improve their sites’ search engine rankings.

But how do you know if you need the pros?

1. No one is visiting. Obviously, you need to get the word out there. How do you start a business? How do you launch a blog? By bringing in customers and readers. Unless your first post is about how you discovered the god particle, you will need to pull in readers from search engine results.
2. Your site does not show up on the first page of a search for crucial terms. If your blog is about BBQ, and a search for “ribs” finds you on the bottom of page five, you need an SEO strategy. This could involve tweaking your content strategy, guest-posting on related blogs, or exchanging links with other sites.
3. Your blog’s popularity is not steadily increasing. One week on the Internet is like a year in real life; if you don’t take advantage of your blog’s momentum, you could lose your readership. Maintaining a steady output of compelling content is crucial, but hooking in new users is equally important. Search engines results is where many of them will come from.
4. Comments are all over the place. If your readers leave comments indicating they don’t understand what your blog is about, that is a strong indication that you need to change your site strategy. Once you’ve established a theme that showcases your strengths and is feasibly maintainable, get thee to an SEO professional.
5. You have a troll infestation. Is your blog getting a lot of comments from readers who are just there to stir up trouble? Part of the problem could be that your site is showing up in undesirable searches. For example, if your blog is all about advances in smartphone technology, and you receive a lot of annoying comments about American Idol, it could be that links and text in your blog are causing it to show up in searches related to the television series. This is a job for SEO.
6. Search results are inconsistent. Is your blog showing up prominently in irrelevant search results? Is it not showing up high enough in the search results you want it to? It’s an obvious warning sign, but the solutions are often not so obvious. A good SEO strategy can uncover solutions that never occurred to you before.
7. You or your blog have gained notoriety. If your name or your blog’s name have made the news, those terms are going to trickle down and around from the news sites to other sites. You need to analyze those sites and develop content and SEO strategies based on the types of sites, who visits them, and what words, phrases, and related subjects will direct people to your site.
8. People ask you what your blog is about. Your own mother doesn’t know that your “Green Egg and Ham” blog is about BBQ. Even your mom uses Google, so you want your site to come up on top not only when she searches your name or your blog title, but also when she searches for any terms related to BBQ.
9. You are not satisfied with your blog traffic. In the end, it’s all about you and what you want from your blog. A good SEO strategy will get you more traffic, and it will help ensure that all those new visitors are the people you want on your site.

May your blog be on top.

Al Natanagara is a writer, journalist, and blogger who has done time with ZDNet, CNet, CBS, LexisNexis, and a two-ton forklift. He has written on a plethora of topics ranging from homicide forensics to BBQ etiquette to erectile dysfunction.

(Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1105622)