Bloggers can do SEO of their Own

Bloggers are never skeptical in what they need to do. This sole nature has made them optimistic and self-sufficient. Be it while writing for their own blog or doing SEO marketing for it, they never fall short of confidence.

One must agree to this statement.

Why am I saying this?

Flash back to my older post

Last week I wrote a post – Can Bloggers Do SEO of their Own ? They can – But How?

It talked about the power and self-belief a blogger should have when it comes to doing SEO for his/her own blog. I made a promise so continuing with the remaining part today. Hope you like it.

This is all about the course of actions that a blogger can take in daily basis to promote a blog through search engines.

Before you go on with this article you can have a look at this aforementioned post where I discussed R&D part of blog marketing. The post ended with preparation of final document. If you remember the document consisted of basic information about your blog, list of key terms and engaging small descriptions/definitions. It was more of Homework that you did to set a field before game starts.

Now it is time to utilize the resource you made in first two weeks. Here I will direct you to To-Do stuffs. Read, enjoy, try and then let me know if these really work for you.

Target – 1 hour per day (max)

Here we go –

Finalize keywords – How?

Gather all keywords/key-phrases that you prepared earlier.
Go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool and put all the keywords to check their Global and monthly search volumes and level of competition.
Remember this thumb rule – you need keywords that have greater search volumes (high popularity) but lesser search results (less competition). The parameter is called KEI – Keyword Effectiveness Index [Calculated as Searches / Number of results]. Higher the KEI better is the pick.
Sort out 5-10 keywords (based on given criteria) from the lot as you feel best suited to your blog theme. Retry till you are not convinced.

Time allocated – Total 2 hours maximum. Finish it in 2 days.

Set Meta data of your blog – How?

Pick 2-3 keywords having high KEI
Build meaningful key-phrases of around 20- 30 characters with them. This is called
Meta Title of your blog which search engine bots will crawl and show in search results when someone types the keywords you selected.
Giving Meta Title is like naming your blog to search engine. It has to be search engine-friendly yet looks natural. So take time before you finalize one.
Prepare Meta description. It will be a couple of sentences (around 80-120 characters) enriched with 3-4 keywords

Time allocated – 1 hour is good enough for this

Complete site verification – How?

Simply log in to Google Webmaster central, Yahoo Site explorer, Bing Webmaster central with your registered account.
Follow site verification steps as instructed. You need to put verification code within <head> tag.
Open Google analytics and set your code under <head> tag. This is to track site performance and traffic statistics.

Submit your site to Google and Yahoo search engines so that they track and manage your site data on web. There are many other help areas you must try if you find problem doing so. For example, Google webmaster central Help forum and discussion categories
Sign up an account with Alexa and create a complete site profile. Download Alexa rank bar and see your site popularity.

Time allocated – starting from account creation to complete verification will require total 2 hours of time

Create sitemap and RSS feed URL– How?

Take help from online sitemap generator. There are many you can Google out for free. If your blog is in WordPress you will get good Plugins (For example, XML Sitemap Generator) to do it. You need to edit the setting of sitemap plugin a bit to specify how frequent crawlers are allowed to visit your page.
Submit XML sitemap URL to Google and Yahoo. The URL will look like http://www.abc.com/sitemap.xml
Note down RSS Feed URL (created by default) of your blog. It looks similar to http://www.abc.com/feed. You can also create it through third party feed generator for example, feedburner.com. The URL will look like http://feeds.feedburner.com/abc
Submit Feed URL to all 3 major search engines.

Time allocated – Since you are doing it for the first time it will require you 2 days of time, 1 hour each day.

Testing is important

So we are almost done with basic but high priority technical jobs. These steps set the ground for search engines to index your blog, access all the web pages and show it in search results.

You need to make sure that there are no crawling errors (for this uniform URL format to be used for all the pages), no canonical issues (for this always use standard URL structure starting with http: //www.) while registering your site in search engines and domain registrar.

All these above mentioned steps could be performed within a week, provided you devote just 1 hour per day. However you may take 2 weeks of time to understand and review all steps performed. It is better if you go slow but steady while performing each step. There is nothing to hurry as the steps are crucial one one-time job. Test, re-test and gain confidence in what you are doing.

Wait for the final turn

Well I think this is enough for today. Our next target would be to learn how to build In Bound Links (OBL) and create social media hypes to attract natural visitors. We will take a look at this in my next post, probably the final one of the tri-series.

Till then you can go ahead with first couple of week’s assignment. Let me know if you find any difficulty doing so.