Increasing Your Outreach through SEO
At first I struggled with the concept of optimizing my blog, (aka,
staring blindly at the assignment for hours) until I finally started to grasp
the concept. Since my blog is focused around the world of reality television I
optimized my title tags to be a keyword a person might search for when looking
for reality TV shows on search engines. I created tags for my blog such as
“reality television, dance moms, lifetime, MTV, etc.” which are all words
associated with reality television or the networks that produce those shows. I
made sure to repeat my blog title in the beginning of my post and then
sprinkled other searchable tags throughout the remainder of my post. I even
remembered to use ALT text over the images. I also posted a guest blog post (which still currently says "awaiting moderation") on
Rae Reinhart’s blog “Wanderlust” to get links back to my profile. I then
created a Squidoo page and signed up for Google Analytics. I found Squidoo to
be very interesting, I created a page describing my blog with a link to it. I
also created a poll, a live stream of my twitter feed, and an example of one of
my blog posts. All of the images on my Squidoo linked back to my blog. I then
published it. My Google Analytics page still does not show an increasing amount
of traffic but over the course of the next week I am expecting that number to
grow.
Donand Skyler (pg. 211) was able to provide me with some great tips on how to properly optimize my blog. The most important piece of advice I got from this article was to not overuse my keyword phrase throughout my blog post. Not only is this extremely annoying (Stewie from Family guy: Mom, mommy, momma, mom…you get the idea) to the reader but it can actually end up penalizing you. Google can lower your ranking if they think you are “keyword cramming.” Another great tip provided by Skyler is to not focus on keywords that have a low search volume. If no one is going to be searching for those keywords, what’s the point of even using them?
SmartDog (pg. 212), man’s best friend and now your loyal digital consultant has created ten golden rules for search engine optimization, and come on, what’s gold that isn’t really freaking cool? One awesome rule I learned from this article is the use of ALT tags. If you use these ALT tags over the images on your post, search engines will be able to pick up on the keywords located within these tags. And the more keywords that are picked up the more traffic will be directed towards your site! The most important rule though is that search engines love great content. People love great content. So that means you better put some amazing-ass content on your website. The better the content is structured on your site the more Google will use it, which means others will as well. So basically, Google is your best friend.
Stephan Spencer (pg. 212) showed me exactly what NOT to do when working using search engine optimization. Because nobody wants to be the SEO noob, right? One of the best pieces of advice I got from the article is something I catch myself doing quite frequently, not speaking in the customer’s language. You are a person speaking to another person; your voice needs to come off as such. Don’t try to make the next folding lawn chair sound like the next part that is being installed on the space shuttle. Also, don’t skip the keyword-brainstorming phase. This is one of the most important aspects of getting search engine optimization to work. Don’t just pick random words that you “think” people might search for. Take your topic and look for popular terms relating to it.
Search engine optimization is tricky, but with practice it can greatly increase traffic to your blog or website. If you sit down and put your mind to it, your blog might be the number one search on Google before you know it.
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