Jack Nicholson delivered that line better than anyone ever could…”you can’t handle the truth.” The spit flying in Tom Cruise’s face was my favorite part!:) But for my blog seo purposes here, I am asking the question a different way, can you handle the truth?
Seo For Blogs
I am a firm believer that we can all manage a basic seo plan for our blogs. While some people are seos by profession, a lot of us dabble. The truth is, we NEED to dabble in order to get noticed.
The last word of the acronym is what it’s all about: optimization. Everything we do on our blogs is to achieve visibility. Specifically, we are working towards search engine visibility. Oh, the Google gods is what I should say. Bing and Yahoo are important, but if you want maximum exposure…Google it is.
So your basic seo plan should be building links, using appropriate anchor text, keyword research and formatting. Most will say web design, but since I am design challenged, I will stick with format.
What I mean by format is Header tags, post title, meta description, etc… Now, if I just lost you, which I seriously doubt I did since you are all geniuses,,,,help is on the way!! When I first started blogging, I had no idea what SEO meant. I thought it meant shiny elephant orbs for pete sake! (not really.)
But truthfully, I was clueless. I didn’t know anything about anchor text or formatting. I just knew my blog was going to be hot to trot and I was gonna make a cool milion bucks in a few days.
Can You Handle The Truth?
The real truth, which I have said many times, is that you are NOT going to make a million bucks overnight. Sorry to burst your elephant orb, but it’s the fact.
However, you can get to the point where you begin to make money blogging, then make a living blogging and hopefully get on the road to that million ucks if you work hard enough. But no one will know you even exist without seo.
I remember buying an affiliate website one time. The seller touted it was all set up on auto pilot, completely turnkey and ready to make me some fat cash. And it was completely set up….all automated and just needed my affiliate links. The problem with these sellers, is that they don’t tell you how to promote that site. Or that you even need to for that matter.
They sell you a site that just sits there collecting dust. They don’t tell you that you must optimize that site and build links and incorporate some keywords. Needless to say, my site flopped. Big fat nothing is what I made. $0.00. And actually, I lost money because the site cost me $100.00.
How To Learn SEO
If I knew then what I know now! Yes a cliche, but it so very true. There is so much information out there on building blogs/websites, seo and how to learn it, who is the best, so on and so on.
You have to weed through all the so called “gurus” crap and everything else. I just wanted a course (which they do offer some places) or something all in one place so I could wrap my head around SEO.
I was so green on the web, I didn’t realize their were books, podcasts, white papers nothin! Finally, I found a book though that was like, Oh duh.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): An Hour a Day
by Jennifer Grappone.
The reason I liked Jennifer’s book was because she said it was a DIY seo book and I am all about do it yourself guides! Not only that, she said I could do it in a hour a day. It had also been updated every year to roll with any new stuff that would be important. I’m pretty sure it’s been updated for 2011 also. It would have to be in order to discuss the impact of social media on your seo plan.
I was able to understand the nuances of seo and what it meant for my success. The book covers just about everything you need to really get a grasp on seo for your site. Here are some things in the book:
- Develop and implement an SEO strategy using the winning An Hour a Day approach
- Discover how search engines work now, and make them work for you
- Optimize your site so you can be found, then make the sale
- Use Facebook, Twitter, and other sites on the Social and Mobile Web to put your site in the spotlight
- Find out what “link juice” is, and start making your own
- Get visibility in local, social, shopping, and other featured search results
The Bottom Line
The truth is, without a basic seo plan, your blog or site will fail. It will end up like the affiliate website I bought…collecting dust instead of moolah! You don’t want that. At least I know I wasn’t cool with that.
It’s so much easier to get all your info in one place in order to make the necessary changes or to begin the process of seo. We can all bring our flair to the different aspects, but for the basic comprehension and knowledge….one spot works best. Again, I think Jennifer’s book will do the trick for you. Even if you just need a fresher upper 🙂 Here is the link again to check it out:
by Jennifer Grappone.Lemme’ have it…..how do you SEO? Do you feel you need a refresher??
I will love you forever if you share this post and leave you feedback!
beautiful subject. I think this kind of issues required further updating of
I am an IT-blind person especially in SEO. However, I do know how important it is to get my business to be notice or just go down the hill and disappear. I decided to get help in SEO and this place seems right for it. Thanks a lot for these info and I hope you will keep on writing.
Thank you for visiting! Appreciate the link you shared as well!
Lisa
One good point in SEO is that you always go for natural way and not optimize for search spiders or crawlers. When we write blogposts many wants to write for the sake of getting indexed and attracting link backs. But the truth is we have to write for the benefit of our readers. Getting mentions and back links comes in naturally. Don’t worry so much about Google and spiders. Instead give your best shot to be heard by your target readers.
Agreed. Without SEO, your chances of success are way slimmer. What I think many people don’t understand is not just the necessity of doing some basic SEO, but rather worry about those that do.. Let me explain, two sites with similar topics have great content. One does basic SEO and the other relies, on hell, I don’t know… lol. Which one do you think will stand out better? Truth is, there is always someone competing with you.. If you don’t take steps to “be better” than your competition, ultimately, and while important, great content alone is nt enough, specially in you are in business. Which BTW, who’s not, in today’s world 😉 Just my 2 cents..
I couldn’t have said it better myself!!! Perfectly stated.
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“But no one will know you even exist without seo” – This is simply not true. SEO can help your blog tremendously, even put your blog on the map if you do it right, but to say a blog can’t blow up without SEO is ridiculous.
There are lots of blogs that get very little traffic from search engines. I guess these blogs are more of the exception than the rule, but the #1 thing you can do is create quality content and you won’t ever need to “build links” or know what a “meta tag” is.
But wouldnt you consider quality content an SEO task?
Quality content isn’t SEO unless you are trying to target keywords with your content.
But if you want to say quality content is SEO, then I would say that there are a lot of blogs out there that get a very small percentage of traffic from search engines and therefore don’t need SEO.
Not trying to bash SEO, for the moment it is absolutely imperative for the majority of blogs. Eventually all SEO will be about creating content that other people see as valuable as opposed to meta tags, submitting links, and the such.
Lisa,
Another interesting post here. There are so many schools of thought about SEO, we never know what the real deal is…
By the way, I was totally going to use the picture you used in an upcoming post of mine. You beat me to it. Arghhh
Dont you hate when that happens Steve??!! It has happened to me on several occasions! 🙂
Thanks for stopping by!
I am so torn when it comes to SEO. It really appeals to my technical side (which is strong in tis one 🙂 but I hate it from the human perspective.
I got more-than basics down of course and its showing bcuz organic google traffic is increasing but I know it enough not to care about it anymore.
Do the basics, ignore the rest, do your thing. Thats my approach to SEO 🙂
I love SEO because it’s SEO and it’s geeky, but also because you get LEVERAGED traffic 24/7 from it.
No one wants to continue to network constantly to bring traffic; SEO is the answer.
Great post, ma’ dear!
SEO is sort of a science but the basic SEO I think anyone can master with some little effort. The problem is most things with SEO are repetitive and boring, so although people are aware of the things they need to do, they hardly do it.
I t recently started outsourcing my SEO…so far so good. 😉
How did you find a trust worthy competent soul??!
While it’s important to gain a good basic understanding of SEO if you like the idea of residual free traffic to your site we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of real-world practical experience.
Like learning to drive it’s easy to learn the basics from a book but real mastery comes from applying that to the ever-changing world of the search engines and adapting our techniques in light of the responses we see.
This is why I believe it’s essential to “dive in” to SEO and learn on the job because when you do this you will learn new tips, ideas and methods every day that can directly impact your results.
I agrre richard. But I think it’s important to be able to find all the info in one place and then implement and test as you go.
Lisa,
It’s wee Lori (Wait! Do I WANT that to stick 😮 ) I just came to see what you were talking about. SEO is still a foreign concept to me. YIKES this learning curve is HUGE!
~ sigh ~
So I’ll check out the book and run it past my coach. Maybe I can get him to do it for me!
Question – with a blog like Life,forinstance, what would you choose for keywords? “Life”? Yep – it’s way over my head for the time being. If you Google “Life for instance” we come right up. You’re going to tell me that won’t cut it, aren’t you!? Go ahead, I can take the truth. Just don’t spit at me.
Lori
*spit spit* Wee….Im going to have to look into this keyword issue for you Lori and see what I can come up with!
Absolutely, having a blog or a website is not a great deal. The main thing is how to drive traffic to your blog/website.
For that purpose, you must know the SEO and thanx a lot for your recommendation(books).
Anyhow, great post.
Looking for more great stuff ahead…
So glad you enoyed it!! Hope you like the book!
From here, i gained a lot of info on here. Its really interesting about blog SEO.
Glad to help kavya!
So many people still think ‘if you build it they will come’ and as far as blogs and websites are concerned that is so far from the truth. If they can’t find you they won’t be visiting.
We’re so impatient for results. does anyone look beyond page 1 of Google results anymore? I made my first website 12 years ago at just about the same time that Google arrived on the scene. For a long time you were good to go if you were in the top 30 of Google results. Gone are the days…
Even if you don’t do your own SEO you still need to understand why it’s important.
Exactly Sam!! My first site was just that…it’s built now come visit me. I know personally if I want to find some cool gems, I go beyond page 1 of Google because I know no one else is!
SEO is very broad and there is always a scope to improve your strategy so you can read and find many things to stay upto date and I’ll also download and read this e-book as well.
Awesome sam, enjoy!
Kinda cool – the lesson(s) you learned from that initial affiliate site are still useful today.
My favorite from such an adventure is ‘content is king’. I too had one of those biz-in-a-box websites once. I found all the SEO in the world didn’t matter. I had the exact same content as a gazillion other people.
Not only was I under Google’s radar, they stuffed me in the microwave signal dish and fried my . . .
Great post Lisa!
o uh oh, what got fried Gibby??!!!
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A lot of people who come to me wanting a website don’t know or understand about Google and that book was the first one I read. In some ways once you understand about how it works, SEO is common sense, coupled with some experiential learning for the best results. Google is a computer after all, and needs pointers, about your site or blog. Thanks for the post.
So glad you can vouch for the book too Pippa! i loved it!
Actually I think the main activities of search engine optimization (SEO) is to enlarge a Web site’s traffic counts, and eventually conversions, by position very high in the results of searches for the keywords in the search query. It is the mission of SEO to make the site’s content worthy of higher search engine ranking by being more relevant and competent than the competition’s. This SEO process is often viewed as a struggle to rank well for just a few keywords, instead of a struggle to satisfy the needs of those entering the query.
I agree,,,,we need to determine what “conversion” we are looking to achieve. thank you for the feedback
Yeah, having a blog/site is surely not enough. We should know how to grow it — and SEO is one of the way.
Exactly right Dana!
Hey Lisa, I am just commenting to tell you that you have to love me forever cause I am going to share this post as soon as I finish the comment.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I just found out that I am ranking on first page of Google for some of my targeted keywords and ranking higher almost every day for some of the major keywords. And I didn’t even SEO my blog that much. But I applied my SEO 101, lol, and it is working.
Anyway, off to share so you love me!
woot…brankica share!! 🙂 I found I was ranking for some of my keywords as well. Then I went a little further into analytics and tweaked and optimized here and there and definitely saw some great results!