One of the most important SEO TIPs you can do to develop your SEO for an existing or new website is to use a blog for appropriate anchor text back to your site. Yes, a simple blog can help with building your keywords to your site by simply hyperlinking text (important keywords) and creating links to relevant content. This linkage not only helps the site that you link to, but also helps the site you link from by providing authority on the content you have written.

Of course the rules of blogging can change as new developments are discovered, but I often find myself explaining the benefits of having a blog for search engine optimization (SEO).  Here they are:

1. RSS Feeds: Blog software often has RSS feeds built in which can assist in building link popularity. When the blog’s RSS content is syndicated (or subscribed to by other blogs), any embedded links from the blog’s content will also help in sending qualified traffic;

2. Blog Searches & RSS Directories: Once you have your blog together, your site can begin to feel the benefits of visibility within blog directories and RSS feed search engines. Web sites without feeds (your competition maybe?) are not included in these kinds of directories and search engines and thus, would not receive the added benefits your blog has provided;

3. Inbound link magnet: Since we can use blogs to develop links to each other, blogs are a significant source of many postings to social news and social media web sites. Whether it is text, audio and/or video, the media is easily supported for syndication. The more media (or content) available, the more likely it will attract incoming links from other blogs. There are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, (i.e. the WordPress WP-O-Matic plugin).

4. Well-organized content: Blog software can use category features that allow organizing content via themes. Use of categories make it easier for search engines to understand the theme of your content providing greater possibilities of ranking well on your themed topics;

5. Deep linking: If your blog (or web site) posts product or service related information, you can use “deep links and anchor text” to products and information from other sites and/or pages within your site to rank well for long tail phrases, and to pass PageRank between pages within your site;

6. Canonical URLs: Blog software provides uncomplicated URL structures making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content. Setting your Permalinks can further assist in creating legible URLs that are keyword-rich and help to drive visitor traffic;

7. Fresh content: Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with loyalty and repeat visits. From the search engine perspective, having freshly updated content means your site will be crawled more frequently allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. New and fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site that people will want to visit;

8. Your Supporting web community: Allowing comments and trackback features in your blog software encourage interaction, but may also result in some spam initially.  The blog community provides citations or links from other sites that search engines reward with better ranking.  Loyalty of blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through supported opinions from other blogs, web sites, and in forums;

My recommendation to Online Marketers attempting to improve web site SEO is to take advantage of the blogging opportunities and gain qualified traffic from the alternatives to search engines.  The result will provide incremental increases in your site’s traffic with search engine referred traffic as an added bonus.

When you are using WordPress for your blog, you can easily customize how each page’s URL name is written using variables provided within WordPress.  It takes all of 2 seconds to configure and provides a much better user experience, SEO and even SEM URL quality.

To do this, you will need to be on your WordPress control panel and scroll down to Settings.  Beneath the Settings category, you can click on Permalinks which will help you configure your blog to write a logically named URL based upon your variables selected.  I recommend these variables:  /%post_id%/%postname%/

The end result will look like this:

http://unique-gift-list.com/1709/top-14-luxury-designer-hand-bags/

If you have already started your WordPress blog without configured permalinks, you can add the variables in at any time without causing damage to your blog.

When you need more exposure on the search engines, Pay Per Click (SEM – Search Engine Marketing) is one way to get high placement in a matter of minutes.  Since I’m a Google fan, Google Adwords is one of the most popular ways to get started with Pay Per Click quickly.

Of course, you’ll need to create your Adwords account first where there is a $5.00 signup fee charged.  Once you have an Adwords account created, you can start populating the account by performing research for keywords relative to your product or service.  Google has a built-in Keyword Tool that you can access within your accounts through the Tools tab, and then selecting Keyword Tool.  This same Google Keyword Tool is accessible outside of an Adwords account as well and looks like this:

The Google Keyword Tool is absolutely free and can offer you keywords based on Website Content or via Descriptive Words and Phrases you enter.  HINT: Look for relative keywords that provide high traffic volume.  I tend to steer away from “broad match” keywords and prefer to use “phrase match” or “exact match” keywords.  The broad match types tend to grab traffic that is not necessarily relative.  Phrase and Exact match keywords usually attract more qualified clicks and, in turn, cost you less in clicks from what I call “Lookie Lous”.  Until next time…