Blissdom Recap: SEO & Counting What Counts (Pt. 1)

Panel Name: SEO & Counting What Counts by Kelby Carr & Angela England

I attended Blissdom ’10 in early February and loved that the event offered Wisdom Workshops a day before the real conference began. These workshops were offered in four tracks: Business, Writing, Creative, and Geek. As you can imagine, I stayed in the Geek room. One of the best sessions I attended was the SEO panel. I’m a technical writer by trade and things like usability and findability were drilled into my consciousness for four years so by now SEO comes naturally to me. But I just knew you all would appreciate my notes from this panel. If you’re going to learn SEO, Kelby Carr and Angela England are two women who can teach it to you. What follows are my notes and thoughts on the panel. I’ve integrated my own thoughts throughout this recap.

Are Your Keywords the Right Ones?

My advice to anyone who wants to make sure they’re doing SEO right is to use the same terms within your article that you’d search for if you wanted to find that information. Think about which search terms you would type into Google to find your topic. Can you incorporate those terms into your post’s title or as some of the links within your article? Kelby and Angela agree and they suggest you even go to Google and type in your search terms to see what’s popping up. Try a few different combinations of terms to see what yields the most relevant results — those are probably the words you want to try to use in your post. Beware though: You don’t want to overuse the terms in a single article. If you do, your post will read like an SEO vehicle rather than a blog post. Try to find that happy medium where you’re still writing in your voice, but incorporating some important key words as well.

Kelby and Angela also suggest using the Google Keyword Tool to see how particular keywords rank with other, similar keywords. For example, they suggest typing in “mom blog” and “mommy blogger”. Then look at the Global Monthly Search Volume to see which words or phrases are being used the most.

Take Away Tips:

It’s important to point out that, while you want to be sure people are searching for the terms you’re using, you don’t always have to use the top-ranked keywords.
Type in variations of a theme. For example, search for picture, photo, image, etc. to see how each keyword ranks.

Fix Your Blog’s Title Bar

The screenshot below shows you where the title bar is, your blog’s title banner, and the post’s title.

The default for most blogs is to have the name of the blog (e.g., Blogging Basics 101) in the title bar of the browser. To encourage search engine bots to “see” your articles individually, rather than as a single blog site, change this to reflect the post title – blog name (e.g., Blissdom Recap: SEO & Counting What Count — Blogging Basics 101).

Take Away Tip:

If you want search engine bots to register each of your pages separately (and you do), ensure that your blog’s page title shows the name of the article, then the name of your blog.

Google Analytics

If you aren’t running Google Analytics, you should be. It offers so many ways to track how readers are using your blog and gives you an overview of your blog’s trends.

Kelby and Angela suggest looking at

what keywords are working for your blog (and continue to use them)
which posts are most popular (then make sure they’re linked to other articles within your blog to encourage people to stay longer)
the top referring sites and see what campaigns are working (e.g., did that ad you bought really bring in some extra traffic?)

Take Away Tips:

If you’re not using Google Analytics, start. If you are using GA, pay attention to how your readers are using your site.
Make sure you have plenty of internal links to more of your writing goodness to encourage people to stick around longer.

Tomorrow I’ll have a few more SEO tips from this useful panel for you. In the mean time, make sure you’re following Kelby Carr and Angela England on Twitter.