Our feature this week is written by Jamie Pearson, expert mom blogger at Best Kids Apps and Travel Savvy Mom. Everytime I interact with Jamie, she has something knowledgeable to say about Search Engine Optimization. Today we are sharing her SEO tips with app developers, because these days, getting your app noticed in a sea of thousands can be a similar challenge to getting your content picked up on the Web. So think smart, it’s time to focus on those keywords.
Wouldn’t it be nice if thousands of people hung on your every blog post without your having to do a thing besides write them? If only. Unfortunately the formula for success is simple: write good content, publish good content, repeat.
When it comes to helping people find all that great content, there are a few things you can do to stack the SEO odds in your favor. If you’re new to blogging, or just new to SEO, here are five tricks to keep in mind.
1. Write clear titles
Witty titles are wonderful, but the Google bots don’t have a sense of humor. Are you writing an article about visiting Disneyland with kids? Call it, “Visiting Disneyland with Kids”. If you feel like you’ll die without witty titles, use the accurate title in the title tag.
2. Do a little keyword research
Do some keyword research before you write your post. When I sat down to write about my dude ranch vacation, I discovered (via the Google Adwords Keyword tool) that while 90,000 people a month search for “dude ranch” and 135,000 search for “dude ranches”, 550,000 search for “horseback riding vacations”. Huh.
3. Know what to do with those keywords once you’ve got them
Now that you’ve got some keywords, what do you do with them? Four things: 1) Use them in your title, 2) Use them in the well-written content both as stand-alone keywords and as part of search phrases, 3) Use them in your ALT tags, and 4) Reinforce them in your H1, H2, and H3 headings.
4. Be link smart
Be generous with outgoing links and always use (and ask for) good anchor text. For my blog, Travel Savvy Mom, I already rank just fine for the term “Travel Savvy Mom”. What I’m aiming to rank for is the really juicy search term: “Family Vacations”. So when people link to me, I ask them to do it like this: Jamie Pearson, the publisher of Travel Savvy Mom, an award winning blog about family vacations.
5. Link to yourself too
Don’t forget internal linking either. After you’ve been blogging for awhile, you’ll notice that you have the tendency to cover the same ground (or similar ground) over and over. If you’re blogging about great travel toys, for example, and you have an opportunity to mention fun car games and link back to a previous post, do it.
This list is, unfortunately, far from exhaustive. There are lots and lots of other very smart things you can do to give yourself extra visibility to search engines. If you’re really serious about SEO, my friend Kelby Carr has written a great ebook that will get you started. It’s called Mom Blog SEO: 30 Days to Boost Traffic, Readers, Influence, and Income. Good luck!
I thought it would be harder to give up #1, but after blogging for a while it’s actually easier to just go for the obvious title (and also better for the blogging lazy folk, like me).
That is great advice. Thanks for sharing. 🙂