SEO, some advice to improve your blog and website visibility

As you may notice I have recently created a new website I will use from now on. I will use it replacing my previous hop2croft.wordpress.com. Before say this, I’m going to talk a bit about SEO. First of all I don’t have a special expertise in SEO issues. I’m just giving some advices about this matter based on my personal experience after create a WordPress blog. I suppose that I will update this post while I discover new ways of getting better my website visibility. I will also explain some tools that have helped me a lot to create this blog.

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What is SEO?

Relating the SEO Wikipedia webpage is:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the «natural» or un-paid («organic» or «algorithmic») search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,^[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

 

How can we improve my SEO in our blog or website?.

In this section I summarize some stuff that I belive are import to get your website visibility on the Internet better. As all of you can notice most of these advices and tools can be used for free (following the SEO definition), what makes really easy to another people to know about the existence of your blog or website. So here it comes:

• Include our blog url in web search engines and web catalogs. Although Google is the main web search engine nowadays, it is always interesting adding our blog url in others search engines such as Yahoo o en Bing. Click on the search engines names for visiting those search engines. There you can add your site to them.
  Regarding web catalogs the most popular are DMOZ and Yahoo! .
  These sites catalogs, the sites within them depending on their content. In the case of  this blog, belongs to Computer>Programming>Languages>Java>Enterprise Edition within DMOZ. We need to go to the suggest URL section and we add our. The way to do this in Yahoo! is quite similar.
• As admin you can define some meta tags to allow some search engines look for your site easier. For that end, I recommend to use the All in One SEO plug-in. We can see in the following screen capture how this plug-in looks.
  
  In this video we can see how a Google  engineer talks us about how meta tags are not used by Google to index web sites. Anyhow, and how Julio Esteban Martín explained in a WordPress course I attended some weeks ago, although Google doesn’t use meta tags anymore it could be interested add them because other search engines may be use them.
• Besides adding meta tags in our post header with All in One SEO , it eases the task to add our website within some essential tools such as Google Analytics or Google WebMaster Tools. If you can, try to add as many search engines as you can, social networks and web analyzers. All theses tools allow us to know more about our blog. They inform us of stuff like where our web visitors come from, the most visited pages or the path our web visitors have used to find our website.

• Be aware of the HTML code we write in your pages. To index our website or blog pages in Google and other search engines, robots are used. These robots visit and read your website. To allow them an easy reading is really important to use a structured website. I.e., format our HTML using bold and underline fonts or write an alternative text for the post images and so on. Every single detail gives a ‘good impression‘ to these robots so that Google rates your website better.
• Permalinks. Permalinks are links that always refer to our posts whether we change or not the website structure. So we can change this structure and our posts will always be available from the very same link. Within WordPress there is a Settings>Permalinks section where we can create new personalized permalinks. It is interesting to add to our permalink url, information like the post name or some important words related to the post itself. In this link we can read more about this.
• Create our own sitemap file. Sitemaps are xml files that show the whole structure of our website, i.e., how many posts there ares and how they are catagorized. As we mentioned about HTML, these files make easy to search engines to find our website and inspect its contents. There are some tools to create a sitemaps.xml file like this.
• Add your own blog buttons so that your readers can share your post in social networks such as Facebook, Twitter o Google+. There are lots of WordPress  plug-ins to do this. I really like Social Sharing Toolkit because has many configuration options, the main social networks and it’s pretty easy to configure at the same time. 
  
• In my previous hop2croft.wordpress.com I had the option to publish my posts in Twitter , Facebook or Linkedin after edit them within WordPress.com. For that, we need to access to Settings > Share. I haven’t found some similar within WordPress.org,, but I will continue looking for it . Anyway, I recommend using your social networks accout to advertise your website. Twitter uses hashtags tokens to catalog your tweets.
• Get pingbacks links to your site and put some links in your other blogs. You can use links within your own posts or through the blogroll section. A good idea might be that your friends add some links to your blog within theirs. Another good practise is to quote your post within your own blog. Something like <link-to-your-previous-post>. If we use this, we allow readers to navigate within our blog and we have more  pingbacks to our blog.
• Participate in other blogs o forums of a similar subject … welcome to the Internet!. Partipate, ask and answer may attract potential readers to your website. You can add your personal firm in your email account. Participate in another people’s blog is participate, not to spam them. What you can get is that the website admit bans you.
• Add your post into social bookmarks such as del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a tool that allow you to add your favorite sites from any web browser as Chrome or Firefox. The main reason to add your favourites to Del.icio.us is that you can catalog your post, and make them public so other users can find them easier.
• Write as usually as you can with fresh and interesting contents. This is an old thing, but it is the better advice I can give. If you write something interesting people will start to visit your blog and so your blog will become more popular.
• As I mentioned firstly every advice  we have talk about are free and easy to use. You need to pay to use the next advice. Google has a pay service called AdWords where we can sign in and we can publish our site. How?. Where?.
  Answering where is quite simple. I’m quite sure that most of use have a Gmail account. And I suppose all of you have noticed a banner upon your email inbox. There you can find some advertising about some websites or contents you usually navigate to. These banners also appers in digital newspapers and any website with advertising allowed.
  To know how is more complicated but I recommend to take a look to these article. ¿Have you already know that you can active  private navigation on the Internet?
  In a few words, if we sign in Google (and we pay enough money), when somebody look for or navigate on the Internet it will be easier for him to find our web or blog site.