Everything I Know About SEO

Here, in one post, I would like to present everything I know about SEO.

I know what the acronym SEO stands for – Search Engine Optimization.

Thank you!  I’ll be here all week!

Okay, just kidding.  I know a little bit more than that.  Search Engine Optimization is a fancy term for helping your blog show up when people search for stuff on the Internet.  Ideally, you want your blog to be at the top of the search results.  It’s all about getting seen.

Apparently there are these little robots out there that go and look for words and phrases to match to.  And if you have a matching word in your post or post title or permalink, then the robots find it and retrieve your post when somebody searches for that particular word or phrase.  The more matching words or phrases you have to things people generally search for, the more likely your blog is to come up in the search results.

There is a lot of thought out there as to how to make this work, since everybody wants to optimize their blog (i.e. – get noticed and/or make money).  I’ve read articles suggesting that you research keywords people are most likely to search for, then sprinkle those keywords throughout your post to optimize the recognition potential.

Yeah.  O-kay.

Here are my thoughts on this.  These thoughts have made this blog the standard in blogging that it is today.

Don’t worry about it.  Just write the best blog post you can.  Don’t worry about using buzz words or where they show up in your post.  If you have enough time to research buzz words and you’re not getting paid for doing it, you’re not spending enough time actually living, so go do something productive!  Besides, it sounds stupid when you force certain words into certain places in your post just to get noticed.

On the other hand, there are a few easy things you can do –

You can try to give your post a meaningful title.  Don’t lose sleep over it, but it helps improve searchability on a lot of levels.  “What I did last summer” doesn’t mean nearly as much to anyone as “My awesome trip to Yellowstone.”

If your blogging platform will allow it, you can change your post permalink to a “pretty permalink”, so it assigns words instead of meaningless numbers.  This gives the little robots one more place to hang their hat, and it’s easy to do.

If your theme has SEO fields, you can fill them in to highlight different keywords.  If this isn’t part of your theme, there are tons of plugins out there to give you that capability.  It’s helpful to associate certain meaningful words with your post to help searchers find you.  Sometimes I do this, sometimes I don’t.  It depends on my mood.

So there you go!  Everything I know about SEO in one blog post.  Hmmm…I wonder if, by repeating the term “SEO” over and over again, someone looking for expert SEO advice on SEO will find my post about SEO in their search results and come to my blog where I’m talking about SEO…

Um, if that’s what you did?  Sorry.

Comments

  1. What if my blog title was, “Make a right at the ‘happy people'”? (scratching brow)

    • Betsy Horvath says

      @Maureen Miller: I wonder if you’re going to attract people looking for right wing conservative political views? LOLOL Yes, I have definitely filed SEO under the “life’s too short” column – it just does not compute 😀

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