Before you read this post you should know that at some point someone will say “All well and good but you don’t practice what you preach!”. I know. This blog is currently hosted on WordPress and I am using an SEO plugin which covers the basics but is far from ideal. I plan to move this blog to a custom written blog engine at some point and so investing time in tweaking this blog is not a priority. What I have learn’t about SEO is driving features of the custom written blog (discussions) engine in development right now. Now with that out of the way…….
If you are like me you will have heard the term Search Engine Optimization or SEO and associated it with the sleazy side of internet spam and messages like “Be Number 1 on Google Guaranteed, Click Here Now”. I knew that a large portion of any blog traffic is driven from search but I had decided in my mind that it was something I didn’t need to deal with. I know realize that was a big mistake! The epiphany came when I first started looking into SEO casually and had a discussion with my friend JD Meir over lunch. JD runs a very popular blog called Sources of Insight (hosted on WordPress) yet had some basics missing. When he fixed the issues he saw a significant jump in his traffic. Just last week I was exchanging email with a friend who is the CSO of a top company and told he he only gets just 50 page views a day on his blog. I have spoken to many people about SEO and it is suprising how little people know so here are the 5 top things that I think all bloggers should know about search engine optimization and therefore optimize users finding your content and driving up your traffic. It is certainly not exhaustive and certainly not an original list. If you want to “Pass Straight to Go” I suggest buying the Art of SEO by O’Reilly. Awesome series of books 
My top 5 are:
1. Register with Google and Bing Webmaster tools
2. Generate a sitemap.xml
3. Understand Keywords
4. Install Analytics
5. Run Free SEO Analysis Tools
Register with Google and Bing Webmaster ToolsGoogle and Bing (which now including the Yahoo search traffic) account for the vast majority of internet search traffic (somewhere in the ballpark of 85%) and so making sure that those search engines can find your content is absolutely critical. Both sites have tools for webmasters that allow you to register your site and ensure that the search bots can crawl it. They then provide suggestions for basic optimization and allow you to monitor any issues the search engines maybe having. They also allow you to view the keywords they see on your site and queries that users searched for which they then referred to your site. I’ll focus on the Google webmaster tools here but the Bing experience is pretty similar.
You will first need to go to Google and sign in at [www.google.com] with your Google ID. Once you are in you will need to add your site and do some basic configuration. When you add your site you will first need to prove that you own the site. There are several options such as adding a verification code into some HTML but the easiest way in my opinion is to add a DNS TXT record to your domain. You copy the verification code from the webmaster tool and create a DNS TXT record at your DNS provider. You then go back to the webmaster tools and verify the domain. Google queries the DNS, checks the verification code and voila ! After a few more clicks you are now registered and can poke around on the site and see how Google see’s your site . It is all very self-explanatory. Don’t worry if at first Google doesn’t appear to know much about you. Registering is the first step in letting then know you exist. You need to systematically go through each suggestion, fix issues and then let the crawlers update their indexes and reflect the updates in the results. It can take several weeks even after making changes to see results.
Generate a sitemap.xmlOne of the items the site master tools will check is for the presence of a sitemap.xml file. This is a file that is added to your site and acts as the primary front-door for the search engine crawler. You can find out more in this Wikipedia article. Having a sitemap.xml is essential. Given that your site content will change you really need your site to be abel to update the sitemap.xml file as new content is published. If you are using wordpress there are several tools that will do this for you. Some simply allow you to generate a file and manually re-submit it to the search engines. I use the Yoast WordPress plugin today.
Understand KeywordsSearch engine keywords are essential to understand two fundamental things. The first is the keywords that the search engine sees on your site. Think of it as the content that the search engine sees as available to match to potential users. The second (and often over looked) is the keywords that users are searching for. Google allows you to look at keywords and view the amount of times users were looking for content that matched with those words. As an added bonus they conveniently provide a nice interface to compare the supply of keywords and the demand to advertise against them and the amount of people searching against them. This allows you to look for areas with your target topics where users are crying out for content and where little is available today. You can also predict the amount of traffic this would generate if you were able to fill that gap in the market. A useful tool is the Google Adwords tool. Sophisticated SEO software often uses the Google Data API’s to get similar data programmatically.
Install AnalyticsWhats that phrase “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it?”. While webmaster tools will provide basic data about queries and keywords the more sophisticated analytics tools will allow you to capture rich data. You can even instrument scenarios such as a user moving through a registration wizard to find out where they drop off or so A/B variant testing to compare experiences or articles. I am using the Google analytics. Similar to the webmaster tools you will need to register your site and prove ownership, after which you will be given a piece of JavaScript that you call from every page on your site. I use a nice free iPhone app called Analytics Agent Lite to track my stats on my phone.
Run Free SEO Analysis ToolsFinally there are a number of things you will want to configure ranging from ensuring you have meta-content tags, individual page titles, encoding to ensuring you use H1, H2 etc HTML elements. A really simple free tool that I have found is WooRank. Just type in your domain and let it generate a report. Simple, quick and free.
So there it is, 5 Basic Things Any Blogger Should Know About SEO and that could have dramatic effects on your traffic. If this has been useful and you get results please let me know in the comments!