Blogging Tips

The other day someone I know approached me about taking a look at a business website because they’d spent a fair amount of money with a search engine optimization company toward getting the kind of traffic they thought they deserved. The mission failed miserably.

I’ve been working with SEO as a content writer for several years now but I’m no expert.  If I was though, one of the first things I would do when writing a top ten list about the things you need to know about it is let everyone know there are no experts.

Of course there are people who know more about search engine optimization than others, but if they start telling you things like you can get a number one page ranking in Google in a very short amount of time, you should take your money and run for the hills.

Still, there are a few things I have learned about how SEO works and because I haven’t made any of them up but learned them from other people, I can leave you with some of them and feel fairly confident they work fine regardless of all the shifting parameters  Google continually throws our way.

1. You need good content. Don’t even bother trying to stuff keywords in the landing page content either.  Like a friend of mine said once, you might even get away with keyword stuffing for a little while and drive traffic to your site, but you look pretty silly when visitors arrive to the kind of broken English that too many keywords creates. You’ll just wind up with traffic arriving and then clicking away in record numbers.
2. You need a good landing page.  I’ve seen people with floating content on their landing page and all kinds of graphics and buttons and tabs and in the end it all looks really psychedelic ( for those of your old enough to remember that phrase) but it doesn’t give the Google bots anything to grab onto. There’s still nothing that can replace good optimized content . Someone I work with is even experimenting with video as the main source of information on the landing page, but they still get me to write a blog at the bottom so Google has something to hang its hat on.
3. You don’t need to use every keyword you can find.  That’s why it’s called keyword research. Too many keywords doesn’t have focus. Others may disagree but I think you need to focus on a few keywords best suited to your market. Even if there’s competition, just dig in and fight it out.

Remember you need to beware of anybody who tells you they can get you a page one ranking in just a few short months. And there’s just one more thing too. If you don’t get the kind of traffic you’re expecting after three or four months, adjust the methods and keywords you’re using but don’t stop advertising with search engine optimization techniques.  The minute you abandon ship, it sinks and you lose whatever ranking you’ve gained.