03.27.08 SEO: Rising Tides Lift All Ships

Compassion Blogger Randy Elrod created LTT: Let’s Talk Tech.  It was really nothing fancy; just a bunch of bloggers at the end of a week in Uganda circling up some folding chairs in a hotel cafeteria to share technical tips.  Randy organized our LTT time because, as he said, “Rising tides lift all ships.” In other words, if I can help you blog better it helps me and everyone you’re linking to too.  It’s web karma.  And it’s true.  So allow me to share a little something from LTT that’ll lift your blog and every blog you’re linking to as a result.

Tom Emmons, internet guru over at Compassion International, taught us some simple and effective SEO tricks in our LTT time.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and there are people who do nothing but work on getting a corporation’s web sites onto the first page of results for specific search requests on Google.  Here’s some of what Tom says those folks are doing to make that happen, things I’m doing, things you can do too:

1. Decide what search word or phrase you want Google to associate with your post.  Let’s say it’s “Compassion International”.  You want people who search for “Compassion International” to find your post about the organization. Put that phrase in the title of your post, the URL of that post, the first sentence of your post and in every paragraph of your post.

2. Use dashes in your URLs.  Let’s say the URL is example.wordpress.com/seo_rising_tides_lift_all_ships.  Google sees seorisingtidesliftallships.  Gibberish.  Instead, change the “_” to “-” so it reads example.wordpress.com/seo-rising-tides-lift-all-ships and Google will see “seo rising tides lift all ships.” And that increases the likelihood that someone searching for “seo” and “ships” (for whatever reason) will find your post. (Pete W disagrees in the comments of this post with the dash advise given here and has other great insight on SEO - read his great comment!)

3. Title images well.  Don’t call the picture “DSC2567.jpg” just because your digital camera did.  Instead, name it “Frozen Head State Park Tennessee Sunrise.jpg” For more advanced bloggers go here for additional image related SEO tips.

4. Don’t begin your post with an image.  Google weights that first sentence heavily in determining how far up to place your page in search results.  Google sees your image’s code as the first sentence of your post which doesn’t help you at all.  I know it looks pretty but sometimes, if you’ve written something for the purpose of being found by Google, less attractive is better.

You probably can’t do any of these on every post but using them even some of the time has upped my search engine traffic by over 400% on some days.  If people pay you per page view to advertise on your site, that’s no small change.

Any other SEO tips to share?

Thanks Tom and Randy.