What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is still the ultimate bread-and-butter of internet marketing. That is, our blogs and websites have to be friendly with the search engines most specially with Google since it garners the top searches on the web.

While it is no use exerting effort, time and money on blogs or websites that receives no response, visitors, and links, it is no use as well to write numerous articles without being read. Recently, I dug again to my online notes about SEO which I made during my internship period at Auza.net last summer. They are actually found in this blog archived at April 2008.

There are lots of relevant websites of SEO actually. And I found these very informative and comprehensive: searchenginejournal.com and carlocab.com. Though there are hundreds (or maybe thousands) SEO websites out there, I found these rank in Google well for a long time already. Through these websites, I learned about these things:

Submitterbot.com

It is practically a website that stores a lot of web directories. You just have to sign up and submit your blog or website to upto 400 web directories with just a few clicks without directly going to the directories’ websites. This is convenient rather than the manual submissions which I did a few months back, submitting over twenty websites to every web directory. Talk about stress.

EzineArticles.com

Articles submission is another SEO technique to have your articles read, rated and spread. The source of the article is obviously your website so that is promoting your website in a way. Other article submission directories are GoArticles.com, ArticlesDashboard.com and many more. Submitterbot.com also has articles submission as a main feature.

Optimizing your Tags and Titles

These should come in handy if you are using Content Management System and mine is Wordpress because you can just do this with a few clicks. Manually optimizing your posts in the source code is quite laborious. This technique gives Google a glimpse of your post’s content, so I’ve heard. Make sure to enrich your tags and titles with keywords but only upto 2-3 percent. You don’t want to be blacklisted by Google for keyword stuffing, a blackhat technique of SEO that puts exaggerated amount of keywords.

What are keywords?

When people use Google, they search. Right? So what basically is done to search. We use words. And these words are critical if you want these words to lead the searchers directly to your site. Ultimate TIP that I’ve read more than often is that your blog or website must have its own KEYWORDS. It is its own identity. This blog’s keywords are Bohol and Technology. Right now, search bohol technology on google, my blog is invisible yet. They say SEO is easy but the keywords I chose are truly competitive since many other companies are having these as their keywords too.

StudentBohol

My first blog is http://studentbohol.blogspot.com and its keyword are bohol, student and students. And it is number one on Google. It beat the Britannica Encyclopedia Online which was number one way back then. Maybe this is because my chosen keywords are not competitive enough. And to tell you honestly, even though it ranks well, it is not earning.

Adsense, Adgtize, Nuffnang, Adbrite

These are just few of the online marketing sites you can sign up to. Of course, we want to earn while blogging. But having ads as a first step in making your blog is the ultimate major no-no. Do SEO first. And the money and visitors will follow. I take that from what I’ve read and not experience because obviously, mine isn’t ranking and earning well. hehe. But I love writing and blogging has enable me to pursue this love. Case in point: Anyone can be a blogger even he or she hates writing.