Writing, proof reading and editing posts is a time consuming task – but we all gotta do it.

One of the most important parts of creating a blog post is to think about the value to the user, but also the value to the little bots/spiders that search engines send out to trawl through your content. Clearly – I’m talking about SEO. Search Engine Optimisation.

So what parts of my blog post can I SEO-imize? I hear you fictitiously asking.

Well, here are the areas that I think about:

1. The Title
2. The content
3. The tags
4. The Images
5. The links

The Title

When you think of SEO, you should really be thinking ‘keywords’. Keywords are what you type into Google when you are searching for something. When you are thinking of the title for your blog post, don’t just slap in something nonsense. Think about how someone will search Google and come across your post. The title is the link that they will see in the results so you have to make it catchy, descriptive and most importantly what your readers are searching for. I have SEO in the title of this post for this reason as this post is about SEO and that is also what people will search for on Google.

The Content

The content section of your post is where the most value can be gained. If you are writing about Britney Spears then you sure as hell better write her name a good few times in the post. Don’t over do it though. If you do you are basically saying to the spiders that you are deliberately trying to game the system. If you over use your keyword(s) in the post you will be penalised – which is obviously not a good thing. Notice how I have managed to avoid writing the acronym for Search Engine Optimisation in the section – I have already written it 5 times already in this post – I don’t want to over do it.

The Tags

Every post in every blog should have tags associated with it. It makes things easier to find. It also gives the spiders further places to reference your site for the keywords you are using. On top of that, guess what, you get to repeat your keywords again. Sweet.

The Images

Google and the other search engines of note (Yahoo, MSN, Ask) cannot read images – yet. This will inevitably be possible in the future but at the moment they need a helping hand. 

By adding title and alt tags to your images you are lending your post more credibility. Your title and alt tags, associated with your images, describe the image as well as your post. It is another way to drop in your keywords. By doing this, and naming your images (i.e the file name) properly, you can also increase your traffic streams from images.google.com.

When you go to Google, click on images in the top left hand corner and search for your favourite star – where do you think Google gets the list of images and how do they know that they relate to the star that you searched for? It’s because the filenames, title and alt tags were properly set.

The Links

This is one of the best tips I can give: Link to as many of your previous posts in the new posts that you are writing as possible – and choose your link text carefully.

This is called deeplinking – another buzz word in the realm of Search Engine Optimization. When you go off your site and beg people to give you a backlink – they are usually only linking to your homepage. This means that your homepage has a Pagerank of X but the rest of your site has nothing. You need to distribute that Pagerank to the other pages in your site as much as possible.

Why?

I’ll answer that with another question: How do you think the search engines determine the first result when you search? Answer: Relevancy and Pagerank.

Relevancy is based on the keywords in your post – we’ve covered that. Pagerank is the amount of other sites linking to your page. The more pages with pagerank that link to your posts the better. That means that you have to link to the other pages within your site in order to pass on your homepages’ Pagerank. This distributes the Pagerank evenly throughout the site and has the added bonus of enticing your readers to click through them to read other stories on your site – which has the further added bonus of lowering your Bounce rate.

It all makes sense – right?

Tags: deeplinking, pagerank, search engine optimization, SEO

Categories: Google, SEO

I’ve had a few opportunites drop by my email box in regards to MusicReviewZone.com. Some fall into the category of providing content for backlinks to being sent music CDs for review, or advertising related.

Each time someone from another company has approached me I’ve tried to weigh up the offer and decide how best to proceed based on my site’s progression and growth, not just to grab the offer because – well … hell – it’s an offer!

I find it incredibly important to put due dilligence into offers. Are they right for my site? Will it help the site grow? What does the company making the offer want to achieve? Any ramifications?

I recently had an offer from a leading UK tabloid newspaper. They wanted to send me their breaking news stories so that I could publish them on my site. They wanted full disclosure of the articles origin through backlinks. So – for every article of theirs that I posted on my site, I would say "written by <link to newspapers website here>".

It was clear that they wanted to broaden their readership in other countries as well as improve their SEO by deeplinking.

I thought the idea would be great for my site as well as theirs. I only had a couple of questions:

1. If, for any reason, the arrangement is terminated – can you give any assurances that your company will not seek to have all previously published articles removed from my site?
2. Is this a short-term or long term offer?

The reasoning behind these questions should be pretty clear. I didn’t want to post all of their articles and build my site only to have it decimated when they demanded that I remove all of their content. That would make my site look pretty bad, right?

The reason for the second question was to guage whether or not I would be upping my daily post count on a short or long term basis. Ideally I wanted a long term offer. A short term offer would only help my site – short term – and after the offer expired, I’d be dropping back down to the 3 posts that I have published each day.

When I asked these questions – I was attempting to solidify the offer with proper details. I have yet to hear back from the company. That was over a week ago.

In a vain attempt to rescue the deal, I emailed my contact again a few days ago – but still – nothing.

I am now not sure what their mindset is – you know – why they have seemingly bailed. When I mentioned assurances about the previously published posts – did they freak and think "LEGAL"? When I asked them if it was a long-term offer did they think I was second guessing them?

So – I am left wondering if my protectionism scared them away. In protecting my own assets have I come across as being more business and less blogger?

What do you think?

Categories: Experience, MusicReviewZone.com, My Sites