Optimising your Blog posts for SEO

It's been a lovely weekend here in the UK, almost 'Summer like'. It's been an opportunity to spend a bit of time outdoors, something us brits dont get chance to do that often! A whole two days away from the screen explains the lack of recent activity on the blog, but I hope you find this latest post useful.

You will hear from many Search Engine Optimisation professionals, SEO Web sites and forums telling you that Blogs are a great way to create relevant back links to your web site through regular posts. There are many free blogs out there, both hosted and available to use on your own servers. The most popular blogging software is WordPress.

Here are some tips to help you optimise your blog posts for SEO.

1. Use Permalinks for your URL structure. Permalinks include the title of your blog posts in the URL (with hyphens replacing splaces). This flags for attention when Google is crawling the site.

2. Make use of H tags in your posts. Where you can use the Heading1, Heading2, Heading3 etc tags when writing your posts. As with any SEO content the search engines value the text in these tags and see them as an important part of ranking the page.

3. Dont stuff your blog posts with keywords. Make your blog posts interesting and relevant. Remember that you are writing your blog posts for humans to read. Make them engaging - offer readers tips or advice. Google likes human readable content!

4. Dont stuff your blog posts with links. Typically try to use about 5-6 links, all to different pages - maybe even some to different web sites. Your links should always be anchored on your the keywords that you are optimising you target site on. If your blogging software allows, aways make use of the Title tag on your links and include your keywords.

5. Dont forget to register your Blog URL with the Search Engines - and also register it with Blog directories. If you are writing good content then people will link to you, your Page Rank will increase and your outgoing links will become more valuable.

I hope you all have a good week. If anyone has any other tips on blogging for SEO then please feel free to comment!

Google Squared - more relevant and organised results?

Searching for anything on Google is now much harder than it was 5 or 10 years ago. This is due to the ever increasing amount of content on the internet.

Google Squared seeks to add another dimension of structure to the wildly fluctuating net environment. By analysing, structuring and categorising web pages, Google Squared claims to be able to provide more relevant content.

Current Google results are currently based on keywords or phrases. This method is open to manipulation by optimising sites, both internally and externally for these phrases.

Google Squared builds on the tradition of providing quality content by sorting resources available on the SERPs. According to a source, Google Squared will provide "squares" - small window-like features in the browser - which represent web pages. Each square will be categorised graphically based on search results.

What does this mean for SEO's? Will we need to adapt new techniques and methods to help our sites rank high on the results? Initially I envisage that the concept of content being king will utimately prevail and the new Algorithms put in place have been developed to cover the weaknessess of the current search patterns. Does this mean that link building will become a thing of the past? Will Search Engine Optimisation become a thing of the past and the focus shifted to internet marketing / social media channels promoting "Content"?

What does Google think about SEO?

I've been watching the Rome Masters Tennis this afternoon, and as their is a rain delay I've decided to blog on a recent thought of mine.

So what does Google really think about Search Engine Optimisation? Strange question? Not really.

Google serves a purpose, it has a job and it has responsabilities. People trust Google to deliver relevant content to their search criteria. They rely on the leading search engine to give them content that relates to what they are looking for. It bases its results on the relevance of content within a web site.

So what does it think about SEO? There are millions of web sites out there, of which a huge number are all related in terms of topics, products and services. Many companies and SEO's are frantically working away to get good links back to their sites through articles, directories, social channels and link exchanges (by this of course I do not mean the black hat link buying or selling). So as an SEO, are we basically tricking Google into thinking that sites are more popular than they really are? Are we manipulating the search results in such a way that Google would prefer us not to - and in which case are all techniques apart from content building really black hat?

Interesting thoughts for a Saturday - now back to the Tennis as the rain covers are coming off.......