The ONLY 7 steps to blogging success (seriously)

I must admit that I agree it’s a professional SEO who should do all the work on optimizing a site, but it’s also true that many of them can be done by the site owner itself.

Irrespective of whether he’s a techie or not. Agree or disagree? So you’ve heard all those Jazz and Jargons on SEO, keywords, meta tags, links, H1 tags, density, anchor text and what not? Phew, quite an overload for a newbie or a non-tech site owner. This goes out to all the non SEO educated people who wants to do that 5-10 things that will make their site SEO’d for Google. Just do them and sit back, you don’t want to mess with it anymore. Here goes.

1. 
   

   Selecting a keyword

   Selecting a keyword is the first and foremost step to SEO. If you don’t have a keyword ready, you are doing SEO like searching for something in dark. Your keyword forms the vital part of your structure, they are the building blocks, so you got to decide what they are. One important thing to note here is that when selecting a keyword, you got to see how much competition you’ve got already. For a keyword like "Weight loss", there is already immense competition, so unless you have the time and money to fight them, it’s better you dodge them and select a new keyword of your own. For example, if your site is on outsourced jobs, you probably have to narrow it down to "Outsourced jobs India" or to your locale, so that you create a niche of your own. Makes sense right? Ok, now you have one or two keywords ready, and you are sure what search terms on Google do you want your site to rank high for. So let’s move ahead.

2. 
   

   URL Structure

   If you are on Wordpress or not, your URL structure should be SEO friendly. When I say SEO friendly, I mean they should be in a presentable form to the Google spiders. Let’s take an example. Non SEO friendly URL – yourdomain.co.uk/82u83nbdfbdfhcat?12hhre SEO friendly URL – yourdomain.co.uk/88e-free-dvd-rentals?12uk As you might have noticed, the second URL carries more information about your website than the first one, which is a more machine friendly one. In wordpress, this is pretty easy to do. While, if your site is on a CMS/coded, like Joomla,Mambo, or PHPbb, V Bulletin etc things can get tricky. There is a solution to each and there is no one rule that goes for all of them.

3. 
   

   Onsite content

   Honestly speaking there is quite a lot that goes in here, and it would be difficult for a non-techie to comprehend, hence I’ll talk only about the bare essentials. The textual content on your website (select All, CTRL+A) should be able to give the spiders some information about your site and the products. This is vital. If you can’t do this, then there is a lot you are compromising. So tweak the landing pages textual content so that your keywords are sprinkled evenly. Don’t over do it. A text to keyword ratio of 5-6% is just fine. You can repeat this on all the pages at your site, and make the textual content in them optimize for the keyword. This will help in the overall worthiness of your site. Remember…don’t over do. It may lead to trouble.

4. 
   

   Others onsite factors

   I’ve put all the other onsite factors to one category because each of them are not significant on their own but makes an impression when combined with other factors. These are – Image ALT tags – Not really worth, but may help sometimes. Change all the ALT names, descriptions and Titles of your images to a sentence that related to the keyword and the content. You may be easily tempted to stuff all your keywords into them, but that is not good at all. It can harm you if you over do it. H1 Tags Make sure that there are H1 tags in your code, and ensure that your keywords and related clauses are embedded in H1 tags. Spiders pick up content from the H1 tags, and consider them relevant to your site. Again, don’t over do it. STRONG Make sure that you don’t use BOLD element in your HTML instead, either replace them with STRONG or find a work around. BOLD is only visual while keywords in STRONG are absorbed by the spiders. So if you can combine H1 tags and STRONG tags, that is great. If you run into trouble by highlighting unwanted words, use CSS to tweak it and clear the junk out.(Bonus tip ) Footer Text Utilize the footer text, it carries some level of importance on some search engines, because that’s the last thing they see on your site. Make sure that instead of that boring copyright text it’s something related to your keyword that you write. Makes more sense.

5. 
   

   Off site factors – Incoming Links

   All of you know that incoming links help much in building your authority. Also I often see lot of wrong ideas floating around regarding link building. Some wrong ideas about link building that I found popular are. – Link exchanges give you authority – NO they don’t. It’s a worthless exercise. – Google Page Rank decides your rank on Google results – NO it doesn’t. I can rank a PR1 website over a PR 5 with less effort for a selected keyword. – If some porn site (bad neighborhood) links to you, you are in trouble – NO it does not. It will not help you and it will not harm you either. – If you get anyone linking to you, it’s good – NO, you should be selective as to who links to you (if at all you decide who links to you). – The more the links the merrier – NO, It’s not the numbers but the quality of the links that matters. More link building tips here.

6. 
   

   Sitemaps

   Now, assuming that all the above steps are taken and optimized without overdoing it, you are ready to submit your site to Google. For this create a sitemap. Remember, this is the final step, so you want to go back and make sure that you haven’t done anything wrong like overdoing keyword stuffing.

7. 
   

   Promoting your site

   Now that everything is in place, you can start letting the world know that you have a great website. Two simple strategies I’d recommend here are – 1) Submitting to Directories and 2) Submitting to Social bookmarking sites. When submitting to social bookmarking sites, make sure that a powerful user notices your site. And don’t immediately sign up for an ID and submit your site. It doesn’t work that way. I can help you submit your sites, provided they have quality content if you can add me as a friend at my social networks (see right hand panel top). My recommendation is Stumble Upon, it gives you great traffic. I’m not allowed to add any more friends on SU myself, as I’ve reached the 200 limit, but you sure can add me.

So there you have it, the simple 7 steps involved in making your site successful, right from basic SEO to promoting it. If you are comfortable with it, start with Step 1 today and put your site on steroids. Make sure that things are natural and steady any rush can lead to disappointment. If you have any doubts meanwhile, feel free to ask me or hire me if you wish.