So, over the past few days, I’ve been learning a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) for my blog, a field in which I severely lacked before.

Why it’s important

SEO or search engine optimization is important to any website or blog because it helps you rank better in search engines. This will bring you quality targeted traffic (organic traffic) that will as a result grow your blog in popularity and give you some good exposure in search rankings.

Although this isn’t the most important factor in blog success, it is sure important and it was about time I got down to it.

Organic traffic not only brings more readers to your website but can make your ad space more attractive or result in affiliate commissions hence earning you a bit of money if you optimize well.

What I did:

No Follow – As many of you may or may not know, Google put no follow there for a reason. The reason they did this was originally to protect blogs from comment spam by making links in them invalid. Overtime this notion has been lost and plug-ins (like the one was using) were developed to remove the no follow attribute. Comment posting on blogs shouldn’t be about trying to get links and I originally disabled no follow to secretly reward my readers.

As of this post, this blog is once again no follow. If I loose any readers over it, then you guys were here for the wrong reason. This blog exists to help people, not to give out free backlinks (I’ll do that in my posts, and because the blog will rank better, it will benefit you guys more anyways).

Link schemes – Google hates these and has been slapping down sites that use them in the search rankings. Examples of programs considered to be link schemes would be PayPerPost, ReviewMe, TextLinkAds, etc. As of today I will not be using PayPerPost again, and would recommend looking at if you do to. Remember SEO isn’t the be all end all of money making, but it helps drive new visitors to your website (but different things work for different people, each situation is unique).

If I may quote Google:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

- Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Sitemaps – Sitemaps help Google crawl you website better and find pages. To try and fix this I installed a very handy plugin called Google XML Sitemaps (found here). It is a very handy sitemap generator. I have not noticed a effect from it yet, but I’ll keep you guys updated….

All in One SEO – The only other plugin I’d recommend is All in One SEO (found here). I’ve had it installed for a while and just want to give it another shout-out. It is great! It does a lot of nice things such as optimizing your title, description and keywords, as well as blocking off your archives so no duplicate content (which lowers your search rankings) is indexed, while still giving you full control over its settings.

Still Learning…

As I continue to learn about SEO and optimize my blog, I’ll keep you guys updated. If you have any SEO tips, please drop a comment. In my quest to improve my search rankings any help is appreciated.