More from your blog

I’m sure you’ve seen it. Many bloggers will post the hilarious search terms that people have used to find their blog.

You’re going to need to set up Google Analytics on your blog. I have made that a separate post. For a walkthrough on setting up Analytics, see this post.

Once you’ve got analytics set up, you’ll see this screen. Look at the left sidebar:
Then you’ll see a screen over to the right with the top 10 keyword searches. You’ll also see a place where you can click to view the full report:Here, you can scroll through and see every keyword that people have typed into Google and found your site.

Fun stuff huh? Actually, some of it will probably be disturbing.

What can I do with this? Well, if you notice some practical keywords that people are using to find your blog, you might want to consider writing about that subject more, or optimizing the post attached to that keyword/phrase.

Whatever you do with it, just remember that people are weird, and don’t take anything personally, like the words people used to stumble across your blog.

SEO = search engine optimization aka “showing up in Google”

SEO done within a blog post is called on-page SEO and is one of the most important factors of SEO. Backlinks, good consistent content and linking within your own site are other important factors. This post will show you 5 ways that you can optimize each blog post individually.

1) Use keywords in your post title.
This is a big one. Of course, there will be times when this does not make sense, but you should try to do this with almost every post. Having your keywords in the posts title is one of the most important factors of on-page SEO.

2) Use the keyword/phrase 3-5 times in an average blog post.
Too little isn’t a good idea, and too much is definitely a bad idea. The Google robots can tell if you are “keyword stuffing”, so don’t do it! I recommend using the keyword/phrase 3-5 times for every 300 words in your blog post.

3) Image name and “alt” tag.
It is important to name your image after your keyword and to add that keyword to the “alt” tag of the image. This is an example of the code I used for the image in this post:

You can see that the image name has the keywords as well as the alt tag. You should do this too. IMG_7784 does NOT help your SEO one bit! 🙂

4) Use a meta description for each post.
Include keywords in that description and make sure it is not more than 160 characters. To see how to add a meta description to every blog post, see this post.

5) Link to other posts.
For the post that you are working on, this will not be possible right away. However, it is a good idea to link back to older posts on your blog every now and then. So if you’re talking about a blue sweater that you posted about last year, link to that post! Search engines like when a site has a good internal linking structure, so do this at least every 5 posts if you can.

There you go! Remember, on-page SEO is not everything. You should still be producing consistent, good content and should be looking to build quality, natural links back to your blog and specific blog posts.

Having Google Analytics on your blog is very important and can provide a ton of valuable information about who is visiting your website.

Among other things, Google Analytics can tell you how many people visit your blog, where they came from, how long they stayed on your site, what keywords they used to get there and how many pages they viewed while there. The information can be used to focus more on specific things that are proving to be successful. For example, if you get your highest traffic from a certain link-up that you do, it’s nice to know that. Obviously you would want to continue doing that link-up which is bringing you more traffic than anything. On the other hand, if you see that a certain weekly post that you do isn’t getting much traffic, you might want to re-evaluate that post.

Anyway, I could go on and on about how much information Google Analytics provides. But let’s move on to how you set up Analytics on your blog.

I’ll have instructions for Blogger and WordPress below, but the first few steps are the same for everyone.

1) Head over to Google Analytics and create an account. You’ll be prompted to sign into your existing Google account. If you don’t have one of those, create one.

Once you get past that, you’ll see an “admin” button in the upper right corner. Click that and then you’ll see this:
Click +new account to begin the setup.

At this point, you’ll be able to choose between the classic setup and the new beta universal analytics. I’d choose classic at this point.

You’ll have to enter basic information about your website. Then you’ll see a button to complete the process and get your tracking ID. When you click the button pictured above, you’ll get the HTML code that you need to place on your site.

To track every post and every page on your site (which is what you want to do), place the code just before the closing head tag. Here’s how to do that:

Blogger users:
You’re all lucky, because this process is very easy in blogger. Head to your HTML editor:
Now be careful here. You’ll want to do this just right.

Using your browser’s “find” function, search for “/head”.
It should look like this.

Then click just before the Note: Blogger has its own stat tracker and it will show different numbers than Analytics. This is because Analytics has a more fine filter when it comes to bots visiting your site and other factors. It’s not a big deal but when speaking of true traffic tracking, Google Analytics is generally as good as it gets.

Wordress users:
Since WordPress has so many different themes, this can be a tricky process. If you’re using a Genesis theme, you can download the awesome Simple Hooks plugin for free to easily place the code in the right spot.

If you’re using another theme, you’re most likely to find it in the editor section under the “appearance” menu option on the left side of your WP Dashboard. You’ll have to be careful because you will be looking in .php files for the right spot. Most likely, it will be found in a file called header.php, but it could be in a functions.php file or anywhere else, depending on your theme.

For professional help installing your Analytics code, I recommend hiring Laura from Pixel Me Designs, who can do it for you fairly quickly.

This post will show you how to add a meta description to each blog post on your blog. This is very important in terms of SEO and is a very quick, easy way to help optimize your individual posts.

If you’re in WordPress, download Yoast and add your description to each post using that plugin, which will show up right under your post in the “new post” screen. It is as easy as it gets.

Now, Blogger folks: there’s an extra set of steps for you.

You’ll have to enable your meta descriptions first. Do that like this:

Then, on your blog post creation screen, you’ll see this:
That’s it! Give each post a good description with your keyword in it and it’ll help out your SEO and will give people a nice summary of your post’s topic within a Google search!

Google has pushed out a major update to its search engine algorithm today. According to Matt Cutts (head of Google webspam aka Mr. Google Search to me), this is the largest update to Google’s algorithm ever.

In a nutshell, this update is a major step in their continued work to improve search engine results for the end users. This means that the update will reward great content, and naturally built websites. If you’ve been using some black-hat tactics and shifty link building practices, chances are you’re going to be very disappointed.

Another thing they are going after are websites who are linking to other sites to help their Page Rank. So that dress store that pays you $20 for a link? Ya that could be very harmful to your SEO if you are not using the no-follow property when putting paid links on your site. So those of us who have been doing this the right way all along have nothing to worry about. I cannot stress enough that if you were compensated for putting a link on your site or blog, it has to be a no-follow link. Matt discussed this topic for quite a while in a recent video, which leads me to believe it is one of Google’s main focuses. Am I getting through here? 🙂

Matt also said that the update would look at links more closely. For a while, SEO “gurus” were all about anchor text. Anchor text is the actual text used to create the link. So in this sentence, the work search engine is the anchor text. For years, people said that anchor text was one of the most important factors in helping your SEO. It makes sense. I mean, if your site about dresses is getting a link with the anchor text of “dresses” then your site must be about dresses. Well, that made sense for a while. Then people started manipulating the system and buying links with strong anchor text on any site under the sun. Google has realized that that is actually quite unnatural. If your site truly has great, beneficial content, people would be linking to it in more natural ways. For example, you’re get some links with the anchor text “here” or “click here”. Anchor text like that has always been regarded as very weak and almost meaningless. Until now. With the new update, Google is happy when 15% or less of your links are using your main keyword as the anchor text. That is where I believe that many sites will get hit with this update. There have been link-building tactics revolving around anchor text going on for years that are finally going to face the music.

Additionally, Matt said that a future update will focus on link analysis. So that will re-iterate the importance of natural-looking links and a natural number of links.

You’ll be able to tell if you’ve been hit by the update pretty quickly here. Take a look at your search engine traffic and if you see it dropping like an avalanche, you’ve been hit. If you were hit, I recommend cleaning up your link structure, building more natural links and focusing on quality content.

Personally, I am happy about this update. People who are building natural, good content will be rewarded. As Matt says, “as long as you’re working hard for users, we’re working hard to get your content shown as well”. That is how it should be. As a Google searcher, I don’t want my own results cluttered up with some garbage sites created by people who know how to game the system.