Let’s start with the basics, and then move on to the more complicated aspects, later on.
Today, I wanted to just give a quick overview of what you should think about changing to improve your rankings in the search engines, as I mentioned this will be basic for some, and completely new to others.
Blog post titles
Think about the title carefully. If you were looking for the information in your blog post, what keywords would you use on the search engines? Add a keyword term within the title, but don’t make it look understandable or spammy.
Your blog post is about the increase in gun crime in England, so in your time, mention key words like increase, gun crime, England.
Images
When you hover over an image on this blog, you will see a snippet of text. This is added when you use the alt tag. You can use the keywords from your blog title, to the alt tag within the HTML and this will help with search engine optimisation. Don’t add loads of words in the alt tag, as this will make it look like spam, and unprofessional.
Eg. < img src="http://yourwebaddress.com/image/image.gif" mce_src="http://yourwebaddress.com/image/image.gif" alt="Increase of gun crime in England">
If you are using WordPress to write your blog post, then you can use the IMG button and it’ll ask you for the URL of the image and what text you want to use. You don’t have to be a genius at HTML, but check out Web Monkey for tips and help on HTML code.
Content
Use the keywords you’ve highlighted in the blog post, within your content, but don’t make it unreadable because you only have to add the keywords a few times within your content for it to improve your search engine rankings.
Tools to find popular keywords
It’s important to use keywords that people use to search for your topic on the search engines, it’s this that will bring in the majority of your visitors, and in return increase your revenue, so use the tools like the SEO Book’s keyword tool, or the Google Adsense tool, these will help you find the popular keywords.
I hope this is helpful – like I mentioned this blog post is the basics, for beginners, and we’ll be covering new areas over the next few weeks.
