Here are a few of the tips that were shared during the panel to help you write blog content that will help your search engine rankings with no knowledge of SEO techniques or web development required.

Write Great Titles

Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.

• Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
• Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
• Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
• Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon

Write New and Interesting Content

Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.

Include Personal Anecdotes

Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.

These are just a few of my tips for writing content that people will enjoy reading and then link to, which generates better search engine rankings.

What are your tips for using content to improve your SEO?

Photo by Nathan Bergey, used under Creative Commons.

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In this post, I’ll discuss some basic SEO techniques and how to apply them.

Understanding the Jargon

The first thing we need to define is SEO itself. We already know what  the acronym stands for, but what does it mean? According to the SEOmoz dictionary, SEO is “the process of increasing the number of visitors to a web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine.” So when you perform SEO on a site, you are making sure that when someone types in relevant keywords into Google (or other search engines), the site will appear in the results. Ideally it should appear within the first page or results, or even as the first result. Here are some other common SEO terms, together with definitions:

• Keyword: The word or phrase that users enter into search engines.
• Crawlers, bots and spiders: These are the names given to the programs that search engines use to browse, analyze, and index your site.
• Search volume: This is the number of people who search for a given keyword. Some tools measure this per day, per month, or per 100 days.
• Competition: These are the other sites that aim to rank well in the same keyword as you do.
• Search engine result pages (SERPS): The term itself is descriptive — these are the pages of results that appear when you type a keyword into a search engine.
• Back link: A link to your site from another site.
• On-page optimization. These are the SEO techniques you apply on your blog or site itself, and therefore have most control over. It doesn’t involve outside factors such as getting backlinks from other sites.

How Important is SEO?

Applying even the most basic on-page optimization can bring in better, more qualified traffic from search engines. Still, SEO is not the only way to draw new visitors to your site. Nothing beats creating quality content that people will want to share. SEO is just the polish that will make your site appear more accessible to search engine crawlers. Without solid content behind it, SEO by itself will not make a difference in the long run.

At the same time, there’s such a thing as overdoing it. Don’t apply short-sighted techniques, such as stuffing your site with unnecessary keywords, or getting hundreds of back links from irrelevant sites. Doing this will make your site seem like spam to visitors, ad could even be banned by the search engines from showing up in SERPS altogether (Google has some guidelines on techniques to avoid here).

Choosing Keywords

The first step is to come up with a “seed list.” Think about all the possible keywords (or phrases) your target audience will use when looking for a site like yours. If you’re providing a specific service, make sure to include keywords related to that service.

After that, check out the search metrics of the words in your seed list, to find out which to optimize your site’s copy for. You need to find out the search volume and level of competition for each keyword. You can do this with some free tools:

• WordTracker’s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Keyword Discovery‘s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Nichebot Classic. It’s powered by WordTracker, but links to competition data (although you have to click to get the numbers).

Here’s a good rule of thumb to remember: apart from relevance, good keywords have high search volume but low competition. The mistake many beginners make is that they aim for the most popularly-searched keywords (those with high search volume). While there’s nothing wrong with that, competition for those terms is so strong that it’s hard to rank well for them in the SERPS. By adding a few modifiers (additional words to make a more specific phrase) to popular keywords, you have a better chance of ranking well.

Getting to Work

Performing on-page optimization throughout your web site is easy, especially if you are familiar with HTML. Even if you aren’t, there are dozens of online tutorials out there which can help you find and tweak the code on your web site with little difficulty.

URLs. The first thing you should look at is your URLs. Does your domain name contain an important keyword? If it does, that’s a bonus. If not, then channel your efforts into crafting SEO-friendly URLs for the pages of your site or the posts of your blog. For example, a page about hiring logo designers is better if given the following url: http://www.example.com/hiring-logo-designers. Avoid using only dates, numbers, and irrelevant words as the URLs of your pages. Note that descriptive “search engine friendly” URLs may not affect ranking themselves, but people will be more likely to click through a page with a descriptive URL from a SERP.

Page title. This line of text (in the <title> tag) appears on the title bar of your browser when you’re looking at a web site. It should contain your primary target keywords, but don’t overdo it. This title will appear in SERPs, and you don’t want it to look like keyword-stuffed spam.

Headings. The heading tags of your pages (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) serve a dual purpose. They show your readers the hierarchy of information on a page, and they are also useful for SEO. Use relevant keywords within these tags.

Content. Your content should contain a few of your choice keywords, but you should be careful that the added keywords aren’t detrimental to a visitor’s reading experience. Make sure the keywords are there when necessary, but don’t insert them in every other sentence just because you think the search engine bots will like it.

Additional Resources

If you want to learn more, here are some guides you can start with:

• I already linked to the SEOmoz dictionary above, but the entire site has a collection of good resources, particularly The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO and Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
• WebsitePublisher.net has a clear and simple SEO guide.
• As for what you shouldn’t do, Lyndsay Walker wrote a two-part series on SEO tricks to avoid.

Have you ever tried optimizing your site? What were the results?

Image by svilen001 from sxc.hu

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Don’t get me wrong: Flash is fine when used for specific purposes, such as video playback and animation. But it can be overused. There was a fad for Flash-based web site introduction screens several years ago. We quickly found that just about everybody was clicking the “skip intro” link. (There was even a site dedicated to Flash usability called “Skip Intro.”) As a result, Flash introductions are much rarer these days. Still, Flash is ubiquitous, and that can cause problems.

• There are too many Flash sites that are one big SWF file. This can mean that site visitors must wait for the whole file to load before links become clickable. And, of course, in such sites the browser’s back button is disabled, or will take visitors completely away from the site (unless the file was displayed in a popup window, and I’m sure everyone realizes the problems that that causes).
• Despite the Google improvements, Flash sites are not as search-engine friendly as text-based sites. See SEO expert Josh Freedman’s Ten Tips for a Better Website.
• As of a year ago, Flash had not yet achieved 40 percent penetration of the cell phone market.
• Adobe claims that “Flash content reaches 99 percent of Internet viewers,” but this figure only applies to the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Japan. What about the rest of the world?
• Because of the file sizes involved, Flash sites don’t work well for folks with limited-bandwidth connections.
• Flash sites can be made accessible to those with disabilities, but require special techniques that are not widely used.

I’m sure that Flash enthusiasts will have lots of ways to get around these limitations. But really, why build a site that requires such workarounds, when you can make an appealing site with no, or limited, use of Flash?

When do you use Flash, and what alternatives have you found for creating visual appeal on your sites?

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That’s just the topic of a report from Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. While you can buy a copy of ” Executive Q&A: Social Tagging For eBusiness” for $279, here’s a free recap of the advice offered by Rotman Epps.

Consider using taxonomy-directed tagging, but give the choice. If your site suggests specific tags to the user, that encourages consistency and makes the tagging process easier for users to figure out. But don’t deny users the ability to come up with their own tags — that’s not very social. Just as it is with the people who update dictionaries, watch for the most popular uses of tags over time to expand the company collection.

Automate the process of coming up with that initial taxonomy of tags. Rotman Epps mentions several tools that can help. Endeca Technologies and Mercado Software can both extract phrases from product text that already exists on the site, and PowerReviews will do the job in a turnkey fashion by reviewing sites related to a product category, interviewing people and doing survey work.

Decide beforehand whether you’re going to go with a manual or automatic approval process for user-created tags. If your organization is concerned about filtering out junk, you may choose to go with the manual approach. The downside: It’s time-intensive, and, after all, what you want to engender with tagging in the first place is putting at least some of the content generation burden onto users. Rotman Epps says that “the relative newness of the technology makes this a concern that few companies had to confront.” She references companies that have gone the hybrid model — allowing any and all tags without prior approval, but bringing to the forefront only those tags that enhance the searchability of the site.

Broaden the appeal of tagging by making it easy to do. Have users select tags with check boxes or menus; provide help at points where it’ll best serve the readers in mouse-overs and popups; integrate tag functions with site search and navigation.

Let the user set the privacy level. Forrester recommends that you let a user determine whether his or her tags are viewable only by the person who set them, by that person’s network or by anybody using the site.

Do you have a tagging scheme worth sharing?

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