As a blogger one of the first things you hear about is SEO.  Yes, the dreaded Search Engine Optimization.  Although it sounds intimidating, anyone can gain an understanding of the basics of how it works, how it is set up on their site, and what parts are most important to get done (asap!).

This post contains (a very simplified) outline that describes how search engines view your site.  Future posts will go into each of the items described in much greater detail.

Let’s get started!

You could have the most fabulous looking site EVER and still have horrible search rankings.  This is simply because Google (and other search engines of course) only care about the content of your site.  Because that’s all they can see.

When the Googlebot “crawls” your site it is simple reading all your code.  Some of my homepage code looks something like this: (To see it all, right click on my site and go to  ”page source”)

Yuck right?

So the bots read over that, and they pick out certain info that is used to list and rank your site.  Cleaned up it looks more like this (thanks to seo-browser.com):

Much better.  We can break the content of a site down to 2 major categories: 1) the actual content (what you can read on the site), and 2) the meta information.

Actual Website Content Includes:

• All text on the page:
• Headings: <h1>, <h2>…
• Link Anchor Text: this is the link anchor text
• Bold Text
• Larger Text

Meta Information: This is text that is not actually seen on the page itself, but is put in the code to help search engines gain more info about your site.  Includes:

• Image alt text
• Image file names: “this-is-a-pic.jpg”
• Meta Titles
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Descriptions

To optimize a site, you want to take advantage of all those parts, filling them with information that accurately represents the topic of your site.  In future posts we will look at each of these parts (and others too) so you can know how to optimize them correctly.

See? Not so bad after all.

Be sure to check back soon for part 2, and don’t forget to subscribe to get the latest!

Topics I hope to tackle include: 

• SEO
• Web Design
• Keyword Selection
• SEO
• Blog Etiquette
• Blogging Platform Options
• Plugins
• HTML and CSS woes
• SEO
• Social Media
• Analytics tools
• Oh and did I mention SEO?

This will be a great opportunity to learn lots of new things that will help you grow your blog! Want to know more about a topic I didn’t list? Shoot me off an email or contact me.

Check back soon (and be sure to subscribe here to get the latest)!