Blog Search Engine Optimization-Part II

If you’ve made it this far, you should by now, know a couple of key things before you move on:

• Who is your typical ‘reader’ or customer that you want to read and return.
• Is your site listed in Google and if so, what exactly appears.
• What are the keywords that are relevant to both your readers and search engines.

If you have done your homework and are ready for some more technical advice, let’s move on.

Before we get started, you should always, always do the following:

Back up your blog code. Then back it up again. And as you make changes, back it up again.

 Okay so you’ve got your keywords, you know your audience and you are ready to make changes. Let’s go.

#1: PAGE TITLE

1.) The first thing you need to look at, and probably the place I see the biggest error, is the PAGE TITLE. Go to your blog home page and look up in the very, very tip top of your browser in the blue bar. I’m talking at the top of your computer screen if it’s maxmized. What does the text say?

Remember back when I said to go type in your site name in Google and write down what you found?

Go back and look at what you wrote down, or go back to Google again and search for your site.

The actual link that Google shows is YOUR TITLE TAGS.

In other words, Google is going to place, usually, whatever is listed as your page title, as the FIRST THING a web surfer sees! Your TITLE is usually the ACTUAL LINK to your site.

How many times have you surfed the web and quickly, instantly, scanned results.

What makes you click on a link? It’s usually that brief snippet of text and the link Google shows. We’ve grown accustomed to using those oh-so-few words to determine if we click or not.

THIS IS HUGE.

If all you see is your site name, you need to change it.

If you do one thing to improve your search engine rankings, THIS IS IT.

What do you change it to, you ask?

Get your list of keywords, you’ll need it if you did your homework.

Your page title really needs to be, based on my experience, a combination of your site name PLUS a keyword or two if they are not already part of your site name.

For example, if my site for working moms was called “Reallytiredmom.com” (which it could be!) and I am trying to attract other working moms to my site, notice how the word “working” is not at all in the title, and “mom” is tied into the domain name?

I would need to change the title to something a little more SEO friendly like “ReallyTiredMom.com-Working Moms Blog and Advice”

Notice how we’ve a.) got our site name in the title but b.)also started from the top of the page to add in a keyword here and there? I’ve now got ‘working,’ ‘moms’ and ’blog’ at almost the first area a search engine will scan. Bingo.

You need to get creative. In case you haven’t heard, search engines hate, abhor, spam. And, they don’t read long sentences (about 70 characters total, including spaces, is a good rule of thumb.)

This is where you put on your creative cap, and come up with variations of a site title that a.) include your site name and b.) include your top 3 keywords at least.

Your title needs to be written in a format that is similar to a book title in that it makes sense. In other words, don’t make your title “Mom blogs, mommy blogs, mother blogs.” Yes, those are keywords. But we will do that later.

This is a title, similar to a book title, something that is going to make someone think your little snippet on Google is relevant enough to click on, and make Google think it’s relevant enough to rank highly. (I prefer a short sentence, headline type structure. It doesn’t look spammy and looks good in search engine listings.)

#2 HOW TO CHANGE TITLE TAGS

DID I MENTION BACK UP YOUR CODE?

If you are not familiar with html, from here down, you might consider finding a friend who is. While changing title tags can’t cause much damage, the wrong character in your HTML, anywhere, can cause major grief and headaches. Ask for help if you’re not sure.

Okay, here we go.

Most websites, pre-made themes, and blog platforms will either create some sort of title tag code, usually based on your site name or domain name. Your job is simply to a.) FIND the tags in your code and b.) update it to your new, fancy title.

If you are using BLOGGER as a platform:

1.) Go to LAYOUT > EDIT HTML

2.) Download and save your template

3.) Scroll to the HTML. Don’t worry, as long as you’ve made a backup you will be okay.

4.) Near the top of your HTML code, you should some code that looks like this:

<title>Show Me The Mom: A Working Moms Blog, advice, tips and stories</title>

5.) You now want to change what the wording of what is in red above. Be very careful NOT to change anything else or accidentally delete one of the “<” or “>” symbols. These cute little symbols are what hold your code together. If one of them accidentally gets deleted, things get nasty. Just re-typeyour new title within those arrows. That’s it!

Scroll down and hit SAVE template, open your website and poof! Your new title should be in top of your browser bar!

Blogger is very good about giving error messages if you’ve deleted something by mistake. If you get a red error message on Blogger, it probably means you accidentally took out one of the “arrows” I mentioned. Go back and double check and you should be fine.

 What if you don’t see ANY title tags?

It’s really not a big deal.

• Follow the above steps in terms of opening up your HTML code.
• Copy the sample tags I used with the <TITLE> on each end, substituting your own title of course, in the middle section.
• Paste your code near the top of the HTML code, just under the code that probably looks somewhat like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd“>
<html expr:dir=’data:blog.languageDirection’ xmlns=’http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml’ xmlns:b=’http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b’ xmlns:data=’http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data’ xmlns:expr=’http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr’>
  <head>
PLACE YOUR TITLE  TAGS HERE

If you are using WordPress, the steps are basically the same. The primary difference is that a.)WordPress isn’t quite as friendly about mistakes so backing up is critical and b.)You will want to look for your CSS STYLE SHEET, follow the same code steps as above and save the file.

If you’ve changed your title and included keywords, you’ve made a huge leap in improving your search engine rankings.
Lately, Google seems to be updating Title tags within about a week or so (where as a long time ago, it could take months for a site listing to update.)

Once you’ve changed your title successfully on your site, go to Google one more time and notice what currently appears. Over the next few days, periodically check Google again and you should see your site with the new title as the Google link.