As you know by now, search engine optimization, or SEO as it's often called by those who like to abbreviate things, is all about getting your blog or website positioned higher in the search engine results for your most important search terms, called keywords.
The most prominent search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, and Teoma. Usually, if your blog follows some basic optimzation techniques, you will rank well in all of them.
The good thing about blog SEO, is it is almost an automatic occurance, if you write regular posts about the topics your visitors want to read. I'm sure that is exactly what you wanted to hear. The great thing about it is that it's true.
Write good and interesting posts, that contain your important keywords, and you have already got a leg up in the search engine game.
Post regularly to your blog, so the search engine robot spiders visit your blog often. Frequent crawls of your blog, by the various spiders, will get your updated pages indexed so they can appear in the search results.
Along with good content, you need lots of incoming links to your blog. They are easily obtained by exhanging links with other blogs and by submitting your blog to the many free blog and mainstream internet directories. By providing interesting and informative postings, other bloggers will link to your blog within posts, and add your blog to their blogroll.
If you do nothing else, in the way of search engine optimization, the simple team of good content and links will give your blog a major boost in the search engine results pages (called SERPs) for your keywords.
One thing I try to provide for my readers are the basics of SEO, in easy to understand language. I like to take the mystery out of the process.
Once we have the basics covered, by making certain that you post good keyword rich content, and have a reasonable amount of links in place, we can go on to more advanced SEO.
If you decide, however, that no further optimization is of interest to you, it's not required.
In most aspects of life, 80% of the benefit is achieved from 20% of the effort. The remaining 20% of the results requires that major 80% workload. The pairing of content and links provides, that first 80% of the benefit to blogs, on the search engines.
For most of you, that will be enough, to compete for your keywords.
On the other hand, if you want to add that final 20% gain, I will work with you on that too.
Search engine optimization shouldn't be kept as a mystery to bloggers.
Simply write for your readers, and work on gaining links. Your SEO efforts will then match or exceed most websites on the internet.
I'll keep pulling back the shades on SEO for you, and let the sun shine on your blog.
