Since the ranking of a site in the search engines is largely responsible for the amount of organic traffic a blog or content receives, optimizing any site to increase its search engines exposure is an important aspect of any online marketing effort.

Search engine optimization, or “SEO,” means using technical and not-so-technical techniques to make sure that people searching for topics you write about will find your site.

After getting some great tips from a few site managers I know and doing additional research online I was able to improve the SEO for my site. I was able to distill these tips into some basics that are important to any site that wants a larger share of search engine traffic.

Sites that are just starting out should focus on getting plenty of incoming links. This is what Google uses to rank sites. More inbound links equals more authority.

Also, it’s important that in seeking increased traffic, you don’t go overboard with SEO-motivated site changes: if you create dummy pages and links just to increase your site’s exposure for a particular keyword, Google will catch on and lower your ranking.

With these caveats in mind, here are some SEO tips to consider:

Make sure you link out in addition to getting inbound links. Google does use the number of inbound links to your sites’ pages, but it does give more weight if the links are coming from authority sites.

Be sure to put keywords at the front of title tags and headlines. When you are planning the SEO for your site, think about the keywords that are most important and think about the keywords that will be used by people searching in Google for what’s on your site.

Search engines tend to put more weight on keywords earlier in the page title. One fallout of having these keyword-filled headlines is that you can’t be as creative as tabloid newspapers can be.

3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include keywords. Similarly, it’s important that the URL for each story contains the keywords from your headline and even the category for the story.

4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. If you grab the first sentence or use the same meta-description on every page, it’s nowhere near as relevant as the description that Google can pull itself from your site, so, if your description is the same on all the pages, you are better off removing it and letting Google auto-generate it.

Highlight your top content on every page. One feature that is common on major news sites is a list of “Most Popular Stories” or “Most Emailed Stories.” Having that list in a prominent place on your site, on all pages, would bring more traffic (and inbound links) to your site’s best content, and serve as an entree into the site for people who just came to read one post.

Many readers leave the site after reading only one post, if you make it easy for them to find some of your best work then they may stick around and read more or subscribe to your blog feed if they find your content compelling enough.

Limit tags and categories to the most important ones. Highlight only the most important categories and put the rest on another page. Too many tags causes there to be links that aren’t very useful. It’s better to limit tags to the most important keywords.

Create a Google News sitemap and optimize any images. Google recommends that publishers submit special “sitemaps” to help the search engine easily index the sites pages. Sitemaps are dynamic XML files that you submit to Google and are used by their spider to index your content.

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