t’s one of those words (acronyms, actually) that gets talked about all the time, but do you know what it is?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is how website owners (and bloggers!) can make sure that search engines like Google and Bing understand what they are blogging about, and fetch relevant results when someone googles for a specific thing.
SEO is why some bloggers may be offered payment (monetarily or in product) to link to specific pages on a website with specific wording. Ever wondered why a blogpost will include a clunky looking phrase like “womenswear”? There’s your answer! (We looked into this a little in the “What Is No Follow” post, but if anyone would like this expanded further, let us know!)
Blogger isn’t too great at targeted SEO in it’s basic form, but there are plugins for self hosted WordPress that allow you to set different attributes on each post. We use the plugin “All In One SEO” and have seen a significant increase in visits from search engines since we filled in all of the titles, descriptions and tags for each post.
There are three attributes on each webpage that are used for SEO purposes. They are included in the <head> tag (which is the section of code before your actual blog design) – they are the title tag, the description and the keywords. If you’d like to see how these work, check out our source (that sounds so wrong!) and view the HTML of this page. This is how the title tag of this page looks:
This will usually be the title of your blogpost, so make sure that there’s at least one of the keywords that you’d like your post to be picked up on in the title.
They keywords are words or short phrases that describe your post – so these are the ones that relate to this post.
Finally, the description, which is the little blurb bit that will pop up in Google, etc, when you search for something. This should be less than 160 characters – you want it to be short and snappy to bring readers in!
We’ll be looking at ways that you can improve your rankings in future posts, but is there anything specifically that you’d like to know? Tell us in the comments or by email!
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