In 3 weeks I have accidentally made it to the first page of google search. Of course its only when you search for ‘residual income blog’ or ‘passive income blog’. The first time I searched for ResidualBacon on the list when searching for ‘Residual Income Blog’ I scavenged 20+ pages waiting to see it. Never did. 1 Week later I was on the 8th page. 2 weeks later I was on page 2. Now I sit on the first page, and #2 on the list. Here is a Stupid Simple SEO guide.
Crawl like GoogleBot
Googlebot, the robot that crawls the web reading your website, really only has three key functions. These 3 functions are rather simple and here is there definition according to google:
- Crawling – Crawling is the when Googlebot discovers new and updated pages that will be added to Google index.
- Indexing – compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page & process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes
- Serving – search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user
So what can we learn from this? Well that Google just looks at text, organizes it, then searches through it when someone searches for similar text. Simple enough, but how do i use this information to my advantage?
Understand Google Hierarchy
Title -> Description -> Keywords -> Content. I am sure you’ve read before how important your title is when doing SEO, and it is important because that is the first thing Google looks at for relevance. From there it looks at the description, then keywords and finally content. How does google know this information? Through META & ALT tags of course. META tags are placed between the <head> & </head> tags of your web document, and are specifically used to talk to robots like googlebot.
The META Big Hitters:
- Title – This will be the title of your web page and is very important for SEO, try to use keywords in your title.
- Description – This is a short description of your web page. Once again it doesn’t hurt to use a keyword or two in your description.
- Keywords – Keywords are specific words that you are trying to bring users into your site with, if your could sum up your whole web page with one or two words those would be keywords. For instance, keywords for this post would be ‘Blog Tips’ and ‘SEO Tips’
As I said above these live in your web document between the <head> & </head> tags and are specially formated like this:
<title>Your Title Here</title> <meta name="description" content="Fill This In Yourself" /> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword, more keywords, even more keywords" />
Feel free to copy and paste the code above into your own HTML docuement, if your on a blogging platform like Wordpress you can simply use the All-in-one-SEO-Pack.
My three not so secret, secrets:
1 – Use keywords in your description, and in your title if possible. Its easy to use a keyword or two in your description, but not always possible for your title. Use them sparingly though, you don’t need it repeated over and over or that may actually hurt your page rank.
2 – Use google’s keyword tool to research keywords. The google keyword tool will help you come up with keywords and will show how many queries google recieves for those queries. If your keywords are not getting searched, you may want to re-think those keywords.
3 – Update your website! Many people don’t know that if your page is updated constantly then Google will expect updates more and crawl your website more. (Comments count as updates since there is a change to your web page)
I’m no expert, I just use what works.
I am not pretending to be an SEO superstar. I know there are a handfuls of more information on SEO, like using ALT tags for each image, but to me that is a bit tedious. I have used only the information I have posted here to boost my own page rank and I know you can do the same. Just remember:
- Crawl like a robot
- Understand the Google hierarchy
- Use those META tags
- Research your keywords
- Update your website
As usual I would love to hear your thoughts and comments. Have your own way to improve page rank? Did I miss a tip that can dramatically improve this article? I will update the bottom of this page with the best information from the comments as well as a link to the commentators website.
Comments
Great post Tyler… I am focusing more on keywords and trying to use them more effectively. I agree with Isaac regarding creating content for humans, however throwing in keywords that support my efforts will certainly benefit the humans more than not.
Great info once again… Can’t wait to see what you deliver in 2010.
Isaac, ahah your to right. Maybe I should concentrate a little more on writing for humans!
Jason, I am stoked for 2010. Is it sad that I am anxious for 2011 to see results from 2010?
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ResidualBacon.com is one man's journey and guide to building a stable and fruit bearing residual income tree. Tyler first started earning a small amount of passive income on a whim and a light turned on in his head. He plans on sharing his insights and reviews along the way.
Good post buddy. I leave my SEO to my All-in-One SEO plugin because I concentrate on writing contents for humans. Search engines is not my top priority