Using SEO to Get Your Selling Blog Noticed

For the next couple of weeks, Tracy of the Prairie Patch will be sharing some great information to help us with our blogs. There is a lot of information here, so feel free to print this post by clicking on the "Print Friendly" button below.

Using SEO (search engine optimization) to get your selling blog noticed by google isn’t rocket science, though it may seem like it at first. To put it simply, SEO is using keywords throughout your blog entries in order to get your blog noticed and indexed by google and other various search engines.

 At this point, you may be wondering what a keyword is. Keywords are the words and phrases people type into a search engine in order to find more information about that particular topic. When they type in the subject they’re looking for into the search bar, they expect to get a list of websites that have mentioned that word or words.

 For instance, if you want to find fabric on sale, you type into your search engine “fabric on sale.” Of course, that will bring up thousands of websites. These websites are listed in order of how many times they have written somewhere on their various pages “fabric on sale.” The age of a website or blog also helps with getting it higher up in the search engine, as well as one way links to that blog or site. (More on that later).

 The first thing you need to do is to draw up a list of keywords for the items you sell on your blog. It’s always good to brainstorm with your family and friends on this list since we all think of differently and thus, may think of different words or phrases. You can also use this handy tool. Check the option “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms.” And my oh my, what a wealth of information that handy little bugger will give you!

 Once you have a list of your keywords, you’ll then know what to write about on your blog. Don’t cram all the keywords into one entry, though. It’s best to concentrate on one or two keywords or keyword phrases and write specifically about them. For the clients I write for, I usually write between 150 to 200 word entries, using a couple of the keywords or keyword phrases twice throughout each entry. By the way, more is not better in this case. If you smother your blog post with that keyword several times, the search engines will consider you to be trying to unfairly get higher rankings and they’ll blacklist you. You definitely don’t want that!

 Another way of getting your keywords out there – without it being counted against you by the search engines as being too much – is to take advantage of categories or labels. On the Blogspot platform, it is directly below the box you type your entry in – i.e., “Labels for this post: e.g., scooters, vacation, fall.” Type in your keywords in that box that your particular blog post revolves around.

 Two other quick and handy ways of getting your keywords on your blog post, but without fear of being blacklisted, is putting your keyword or keyword phrase in the title of the blog entry and naming any photos with those keywords. When you save a picture on your computer, label it as the keyword or keyword phrases it revolves around. Then, when you upload it to your blogging platform, it will include that in the title; the spyders that crawl websites looking for keywords will index and add those use of keywords to your tally of keywords.

 Seeing is believing, so right click on any picture on a blog. Go all the way down to “Properties,” and then check out the very end of the line that has “Location” on it. Sometimes this is a very long line, so simply highlight it and carry it all the way to the end of that line. Near the end of that long line – before the .jpg or .gif extension – is the name of the photo that the person who uploaded the picture named it on his/her computer. You might as well take advantage of that extra place to put your keyword in!

Thank you Tracy for sharing this wonderful, helpful information with all of us!

Stay tuned for Part 2!