optimizing your blog posts

[Julie]

Elise,
Do you do your own optimizing? I noticed the post where you kindly featured my blog entry on intuition and exercise is already very easily found and accessible on the web. May I ask what you do/use? In other words, what are your secrets!!? I would love to learn what you do. Thanks for your feedback!
Julie

[Elise Lebeau]

First, I'd like to mention that any kind of optimization takes at least 1 year to show results. So this is a patience's game.

Second, I did it both ways actually. I initially did it myself and then I hire a company (ebrandz.com from India). It's funny because this was a major financial investment for me and indeed I did see my listing in google go up from "none" to like 150# position with keywords like intuitive counselor.

The problem is that's not how people find me! 85% of my web traffic comes from a single keyword (empath) for which I am always on the first page of result. This happened on its own simply because I had written a page about empaths on my site years ago and it was very popular. I had basic optimization on that page but nothing fancy.

The same thing happened for the keyword "business intuition" for which I am also at the top of the search results (both my web sites).

Soooooo. The one thing that having it professionally done did to me was to add referring links. These people know where to ask to get listed on other people's site! And that pushed me up the listing much faster. And when that happened, anything new I would publish would immediately climb right up simply because my web site has a higher ranking now (which is what happened to your blog post).

So you see how it's all related and yet I could probably have gone either way: just keep doing what I was doing or keep with a professional firm. BTW, I did not like everything about that Indian firm. They are non native english speakers (like me, gasp!) and some of their recommendation didn't make sense. It might be worth looking at firms like http://radiantflow.com/

I hope that was somewhat clear...Feel free to post your questions if I left something out!
Elise

[Julie]

Thanks for this Elise. Tell, me when you say Keyword, does this mean you are adding these words as tags on your blog entry or are they paid words on google?
Julie

[Elise Lebeau]

Oh yes I mean add the Keywords meta tag and a the Description meta tag. You can do that straight from WordPress if you add the SEO plugin.

Although google ads are fun too :)
Elise

[Julie]

thanks!

[Wenda McMahan]

Hi Julie,

I joined this group just so I could add a few thoughts/ideas. I am working on SEO (search engine optimization) as part of the services I offer clients.

In addition to keywords in headings, titles (what you have in between your title tags in your site pages' HTML), another thing the engines look for is keywords in links. Also, vary your the text in your title tags for different pages.

As Elise says, the number of sites linking to you will drive your ranking up, as well as having many sites link to you with a particular keyword or keyphrase. You can encourage people to link by reciprocating -- also, do you have a blogroll?

Use ALT tags on your images, because the spiders can't see images, but they'll read those, and it can also boost your ranking, if the name in the ALT tag is something people are searching on.

It shouldn't take you a year to get ranked -- if you haven't, you should register with some search engines.

Like Elise says, it's helpful to learn what keyphrases/words people who seek your site would be using to find it. I've found the keyphrases others use to search aren't always exactly what I might think.

Writing articles, or regularly changing content of any time, can also drive you higher.

I hope these tips have also been helpful. It's part of what I do for my living.

hugs,
wenda

[Elise Lebeau]

Yep, I also did all these things as well, they are very good tips!
in love
Elise

[Julie]

Wenda,
Thank you for this great info. Truly helpful. Can you share what you mean by ALT tags on the images. Does this mean writing in words in the description?
Thanks for lending your expertise!
Julie

[Elise Lebeau]

Yes, this is what the html code looks like for an image:

img src="/images/home.gif" border="0" width="15" height="11" alt=""

This is where you want to add your keywords alt="intuition"

[Wenda McMahan]

Hi Julie,

Sorry, I have been out (on a cruise!) and forgot to check back.

Hopefully, you were able to follow the code Elise provided; she's awesome. Feel free to send me the link to your site/or contact me directly if you want some specific help setting up ALT tags.

ALT tags are also what people who are using readers (because, for example, they are vision-impaired) rely on instead of your images.

The ever-delightful MS Vista operating system will not allow images in many situations without being given express user permission. So the user would just see a bunch of red X's instead of the image files. If there are ALT tags, the user can at least read the text and see what the images should be.

I have deleted advertising emails when I had no idea what the images were, because I was too lazy to "click OK" for them.

You only get a short time to compel the reader to stay with you.

best wishes; I love your picture,
wenda