It is easy.
Would you spend 1-2 minutes more on a blog post that will be online for years, to drastically improve the chances of that post bringing you free traffic from the search engines without you lifting a finger? If you do, read on. If you think SEO is hard and there's something fishy about it, don't read this and others will get your traffic.
Still here? Good.
The previous post covered foundation for blog SEO, the blog and theme setup. This post will go into the every day on-page SEO and how to write posts that will rank high in the search engines.
It is much simpler than you think it is. There are two things that go into writing a SEO friendly blog post:
- The first part is writing a unique, original post that has some value, whether it helps a reader solve a problem or gives them great information on a subject, makes them laugh or whatever.
- The second part, SEO if you will, is helping the search engines to put your post in front of people who are looking for that exact information.
SEO Writing for Beginners
Good writing begins with the title. It continues on to getting the attentions of the reader with great first paragraph. And the rest of the post follows through delivering what the headline and first paragraph promised. The whole text is easy to read and the same things are not repeated too much.
Search engine optimization of your posts is not any different. With these three things, you don't even have to think you're doing any "optimization", you're just writing great content. The only exception is if you decide to find good keywords and include specific keyword phrase in this, but apart from that, you'll be golden with these:
- write a magnetic headline for your post
- include the main keyword phrase for the page into the title (if in any way plausible)
- when you have proper settings on your theme and plugins, the headline will automatically be your title tag
- if you do this alone, you've done most of the SEO you have to do - everything else is optional
- continue the message of the headline in the beginning of your article
- first paragraph, and the first 50-100 words
- in addition to your headline, the beginning of the post has to capture the attention of the reader
- make sure the keyword phrase you're targeting is included in the beginning
- be careful with your keyword use and number of repetitions
- don't repeat the same words or phrase too many times
- in addition to title tag and the headline, main keyword phrase should only be "repeated" 2-3 times, not much more.
- write naturally, make the text readable
With the above and the settings covered in the blog SEO -post, you have done most of your on-page SEO. Keep in mind that you are writing for the readers first and search engines second; the headline and beginning of the article are important for both. SEO and writing good copy goes hand in hand in this.
95% (absolute guess) of the bloggers don't pay any attention to their post headlines and titles. You do this and you're already ahead. Do a keyword research that takes 1 minute and include the best keyword phrase in the title and you've done more than 99% of the bloggers out there (again, just a number I made up with no facts backing it up).
Advanced SEO Writing
One part of writing online is linking, so you should learn to do it well and often. It is important to both link and link with relevant keywords as the anchor text. The anchor text is the text which is linked and those words have the highest effect on search engine rankings, especially with links going from site to another (external linking).
To help your readers find additional information and/or check your sources and references, you should do plenty of both internal and external linking. Link out to the sources and references you used, and link to your own posts with related or further information. An online page with no or very few links is unnatural, and search engines will ignore such pages and not rank them high.
Link with good keywords and phrases related to the post your writing AND the page you are linking to, and always link to sources which search engines see as an authority and trustworthy website. Example: see how I linked on the previous sentence to Wikipedia with anchor text "search engines".
- linking out: always link out to trusted sources of information as references
- when you link out to a website which the search engine sees as reliable source of information, an authority site, you will gain a part of that trust when you link to them
- link out a lot
- link to other bloggers
- link to Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, big news sites, etc.
- link to pages which already rank high for the related terms
- internal linking: link back to your own posts
- use good anchor text on all the links, especially the internal ones
Link to RELATED information, pages you used as references and pages with further information. Your link to the pages is a vote for that page WITH for the keywords in the anchor text. For example, as this post is about writing SEO friendly posts, I'm linking out to other pages about SEO and writing, both internally or externally.
Why? Because online, linking is the natural thing to do.
This helps the search engine understand what the post is about (because you're referencing to all those pages, in addition to what is on post itself). And more importantly, the links will help your readers find more information about related subject if they want to. I like to think that what's good for the people, is good for the search engines as well.
- anchor texts in links
- always use relevant keywords when linking
- even when you "link out", the anchor text affects your on-page SEO
- internal links on your posts are more important than external links (you linking out to other sites)
- the anchor text is even more important for the "receiving end", whether it's your own internal page or another website
- always link with keywords, and don't put the link to "click" or "here".
You should also use sub-headlines when applicable and possibly use related keywords in them.
- Sub-headlines, <h2>-<h6>
- For individual post, you'll be using the headline tags between H2 and onwards
- the post headline is already H1 when you have a SEO friendly theme
You should highlight certain words with bolding and italics. This has very little to do with search engines, so use it to make your text more readable and scannable, making it easier for your readers to scan through the text and still get the most important parts.
- <b> or <strong> -tags (bolding) & <i> or <em> (italics)
- Little significance for SEO, so use these to highlight the important parts of the text for your readers
From these three, anchor texts in links are the most important thing to do (and linking in general). Using sub-headlines and highlighting is a bonus, which you should do if it will make your text easier to read. The sub-headlines, bolding and italics have very small effect on the search engine rankings, but the it's so small that you don't have to pay too much attention to it.
Additional SEO Tweaks to Your Posts
If you want to do a little bit more, it is worth it to develop a SEO routine to make these part of your SEO-process as well, as it doesn't take too much time and most does affect the readability as well:
- manually edit the post permalink (also called "slug")
- The URL of a document should be as descriptive and brief as possible.
- shorten the URL, removing all the a's, and's and the's from the permalink
- set the post permalink as the main keyword phrase for that article
- e.g. for this post, instead of the default "writing-seo-friendly-blog-posts", I set the permalink as "seo-friendly-posts".
- The URL of a document should be as descriptive and brief as possible.
- Add ALT-texts for images
- Always add Alt-text to each and every image
- You could even install a plugin like SEO friendly images to automate this.
- Optional: Add descriptive title-attribute to the img-tag.
- Use clear image file-names
- Small thing to do when setting images for your blog
- Instead of uploading images with file name "picture12478.jpg", upload then as "keyword-phrase.jpg"
- similarly as you edited the permalink url, rename the files before uploading it to the blog
Alt-text is also a requirement for web standards, which makes it even more important. And the alt-texts and image file-names can potentially bring your traffic from the image searches, so this is very important for photobloggers, but every blogger can benefit from. More images and photos you have on your blog and better you optimize the alt-texts and image file-names, more traffic you will get from the image searches.
Meta Description and Keywords for SEO
In addition to writing a good title and content for your post, there's one more thing you need to do. Editing the "meta information" search engines read. With some themes, or plugins, you'll be able to manually edit the meta keywords and description. If your blogging software allows this, you should edit the meta description. Meta keywords you can safely ignore (or let a plugin / addon generate them).
Meta keywords are unnecessary for SEO purposes today, but for historic reasons people still keep updating them "just in case". On WordPress, if you use a plugin like All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, it can automatically use tags or categories for meta keywords and that's all you have to do.
While meta description isn't important for search ranking, it is very important because this is the description the users sees in the search engine result pages, along with your title, if the searched keywords or phrase is in the description.
Thus, even that it doesn't have any, or very little, effect on the actual ranking, the description is ESSENTIAL in capturing the attention of the potential visitor, by providing enough information about the page in question, for the user to clickthrough to your page.
Conclusion
In short, with SEO, you're helping search engines to index your great content better and thus, helping people find the answers they're looking for. Over time, you will start seeing the benefits, even if this is all the SEO you do:
- optimize your main headlines (H1) and title tags
- use keywords in the anchor texts and do plenty of internal and external linking
- put the main keyword phrase in the beginning of your blog posts
- manually set the permalink for each post
- use alt-names on images
The next step is the off-page SEO. As you have optimized your titles, you have already started, because your titles are most often used as anchor text when linking back to you, which is the most important factor for search engine rankings. Now with your homebase organized (on-page SEO), it's time to begin building trust, getting links and climbing on the search engine rankings.
This ends the two-part on-page SEO series. The first part was about blog SEO; blog setup, configuration and SEO friendly themes. This post showed what to do when adding new content, whether it's images or new blog posts.
2 links to this post.
71 comments.
Sound advice Antti. I do all of the above apart from the H2, H3 tags as my editor really plays up (the joy of blogging with Drupal!)
I like to use subtitles because they look great and break up the flow nicely. And that's one of the good parts of WP's editor that it allows adding those easily (or copy-paste from Google Docs which is what I do)
Great advice here. I try to do most, but sometimes I get a bit lazy. Still, just doing little things over time really makes a difference.
I don't like to spend too much time on this stuff either. I usually do a really quick keyword check to decide what kind of phrase I add to the title. And even without that check, I usually use titles that tell what the post is about, which in itself is plenty of “SEO” :)
Thanks Antti,
Brilliant information – but I have to admit that even after two reads I'm still not sure if I'm doing everything “right” or not! Still, with your help, I'm sure I'll get there eventually.
Cheers
Will
Heh, just make sure you have good titles and you've more than half way there with the SEO.
p.s. I'd consider changing your Disqus name to real name, Will or something. I know who you are so you've stayed away from spam filter :) Real name, and not a business/website name just works so much better with blog comments.
Hi Antti,
Thanks – good advice, I made the change at CommentLuv too
Cheers
Will (me!)
Antti, I like how you laid you structured this article. I ran the same material over several articles, but I think I like yours better.
As ever some great advice and thanks for the link to SEO Friendly Images – that's one aspect that has been confusing me – and the sub-titles tip.
I like to think I write grabbing headlines but I never get picked up in Google Alerts despite using words like Google Chrome in the headline. Let's see if today's post about cloud computing hits the spot.
Post bookmarked for reference.
Thanks Dave. I wanted to put stuff into one article. I thought about longer series of posts and then linking them together, but this seemed better for me too.
Nice post here, but I do like to make a point. Even if your blog post is exceptionally SEO friendly, your website still has links with anchor text such as Home, Contact, About, Archives, etc.
You need to put nofollow tags on those except Home. With Home, you should change that to your primary keyword (Blogging Tips, whatever). I'm sure your website is not about real estate :)
Regards,
Kai Lo
Welcome to my blog and thanks for your comment. One could write entire post or several about nofollowing links and such advanced techniques, this post was the kind of “entry level” :) Here's some quick comments on that anyway…
Search engines don't give that much weight to “repeating elements” like menus and sidebar-links, but you are right, one can possibly nofollow them on individual posts and pages. I use the Robots Meta to take care of the nofollow tagging (like nofollowing links to tags and comments, and apart from that, I don't put too much effort into it.
So personally, I don't nofollow About, Contact, etc. And when trying to rank with individual page, you should actually nofollow the home-link, so the rank stays on that page. Although it's also possibility to trying to rank high with the front page specifically, when you shouldn't nofollow. Thus, there is no “one fits all” solution there.
Using primary keyword as home is also a possibility, and good option if the site is very focused on one subject. But on the other hand, the blog name is often linked to the home with the keywords in it already, so that's covered there.
“And when trying to rank with individual page, you should actually nofollow the home-link, so the rank stays on that page.” – I would agree to this if that individual page is converting well (subscribers, buyers, clicking ads, etc.), and I would also say to put that post featured in the homepage to make sure it stays strong.
I would only say to rank high for the homepage only if the keyword is commercial intent, such as, “Make Money Online” or “Cheap Plasma TV”. They convert extremely well in terms of buying stuff/clicking ads etc.
-Kai
Good additions and excellent ideas for follow-up articles :) You reminded me about the importance of measuring and metrics when looking at how effective your SEO is. And when traffic is in, it's just the beginning, just as you mentioned the conversions to whatever is the purpose, subscribers or buyers.
Yes, I once had a site optimized for a specific keyword, and the conversion rate was less than .05%. I then learned about MSN's Commercial Intent tool and it gives you an idea if your keyword is a buying keyword or not. My keyword was over 90% non-buying. If you haven't checked out the Commercial Intent tool yet, you should check it out. It's in their AdCenter PPC section.
-Kai Lo
Twitter @lomak1985
I use subtitles including keywords repeating for some posts and it worked well. The inter/outer linking is equally important and I need to look into this more. You did a very thorough post about SEO, I agree with Will it can be one of the most descriptive articles I've seen so far. Stumbled!
@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker
@wchingya Thanks for you comment and visiting my blog. I'm happy you found the post useful, and it's always nice to see/hear good feedback :)
I've learned from my SEO friend saying that it is ideal to have bold keywords in the first and last paragraphs of any posts. I still have to see any improvements after applying it.
I'm not surprised there's very little improvement as bolding has very little (second to none) effect on SEO, and even if it does, it doesn't matter whether you bold it at the start, the middle or the end. Personally I don't bold for SEO at all, I bold for highlighting and make text more readable (or scannable).
Putting the main keyword phrase in the first paragraph is good, but no need to bold it (for SEO). Having the main phrase in the first and the last paragraph itself is OK, but you shouldn't (or need to) it more than that (2-3 times).
This is the CEAREST AND MOST VALUABLE ARTICE I have read on SEO.
I immediately went and changed the first sentence of my latest post.
How come nobody ever said it so plainly before? Unless you are a techie, most of the articles have been a bunch of gobblely goop.
And I am a writer – not a tech.
I have printed this out so I can study it.
Thank you for an excellent contribution.
Thank you Corinne for such a great feedback, I appreciate it! And I'm happy the article was easy to understand, as that was my goal with it. SEO is not too complicated, when you take it one step at the time.
And let me know if you have any questions later, or if you find a “gogglely goop” post that you don't understand, and maybe I can do the techie-writer translation :)
Nice overview of SEO, Antti. I've recently started putting a little extra effort into my headlines, and have already noticed a difference. I always knew headlines were important, but didn't fully appreciate HOW important they are. You've rightly emphasized it in this post. Good article!
Hey Antti, This was a good refresher for me but I also learned some new tricks. I like the advice about using key words to identify pictures. I was not doing that consciously, so it was hit or miss. Now it will be hit. Thanks for these tips.
I will come back to this page as a reference whenever I'm writing a new post. Packed with great information! I'm going to add it to my “blogging tips from expert bloggers” list on my blog.
It is a great reminder for me to do more in and out linking. Thanks.
A lot of great information here. I really like how you focused on correct writing techniques and practical application.
The url and title are your most important aspect for natural selection these days. And then…make sure it is linkable, quality content that others will want to link to.
Great stuff, even the advanced stuff is understandable for a novice. Thanks for the advances lessons in SEO, definitely will comein way handy for my network of blogs….
Darkman
Thanks Jeff.. When you combine that the title tag is the most important thing on page for SEO with the fact that the headlines is extremely important for copywriting as well, it's well worth the time to spend time on the headlines.
You are welcome Bruce. Using keywords for images is a great example of something that doesn't take any extra time (or very little), when you just form a habit of making the image files something else than img001.jpg and put in an Alt-name, the chances of those images being picked up by image search and possibly bring in traffic skyrockets (in addition to the SEO benefit for that page in general).
Thanks Robb, I appreciate the feedback. I tried to show that SEO does have to be something you “do”, just something that comes along when you make certain things a habit for your blog writing, and I guess I managed to do that on this post :)
A great post… concise, understandable information on using SEO with your blog post.
Nice to see all the advice in one article!
One thing I would add (I don't think you mention it): make sure the keyword phrase you’re targeting is included in the summary as well.
We are to believe Google takes a lot of interest in what is included in the last paragraph.
Andrew
Hey Andrew, thanks for the comment. With the summary, did you mean the “meta description”? – that I did cover. But the last paragraph is an interesting topic that I did leave out (partly because it's not been “proven” as clearly as the other parts).
I believe that the last paragraph has an effect on SEO too, as it would be a natural thing to focus on, right? And natural “reading” is something I believe the search engines are aiming to achieve.
On any article, there's the headline which should describe the text. There's the first paragraph which should describe and summarize the text. Then comes the body text and finally, the last paragraph closes the text (summary, references, further reading, call to action). So it makes sense for search engine to pay attention to these parts.
And thinking about it, what is the most likely place to find a link in a web page?
The end of the text, right?
That's the place to give the reader further reading and list references, so naturally search engines are very interested in that – or at least it should matter, because it does matter for humans (just like the headline and the first paragraph).
Zemalf blog answers “Everything you need to know about SEO” in two blog posts! This is incredible information that you could easily sell as an ebook.
By breaking every single point down with descriptions as you have not only makes it easy to do, it makes it understandable as to WHY you should do it.
I have paid a lot of money to learn about SEO and should have waited to read it here for free.
Thank you so much. I am flogging this post with all the socials I have at hand.
Rich Hill
Rich, thanks for the kind feedback! It feels good to see that my post is helping so many people, that's the reason I wrote it after all :)
BUT… Please edit your blog commenter “name”, using your real name will make your blog comments much more valuable. It's against my blog comment rules to use such obvious keywords. That comes of as SPAM and will not help you in any way (not even for SEO). I won't delete / mark your comment as spam just yet, so you have the time to edit the name.
I've always tried to make the first paragraph have a keyword, never thought about the last! It all makes sense, it comes down to spending that extra bit of time (when you are keen to click publish) to get everything right. Thanks
Antti,
Yeah when I said Summary – I meant the last paragraph. i.e. The 'sum up' of your blog post.
Andrew
This is an awesome post.
I've never seen anybody simplify it nearly this much…
I had given up on SEO for a while because it always added at least an extra hour to the writing of the article.
But if I'm just concerning myself with 1 keyword phrase and the title tags… that will just take a couple of minutes.
Plus, virtually nobody clearly covers the importance of human readers and search engines in the same post.
Thank you!
keep smiling,
Ben
Great insights. It's time consuming but it worth the reward. :)
Thanks for the comment, but I think it's not time consuming unless you want to make it so :) Using just 1-2 minutes on finding a good title, put that into headline, possibly edit the permalink and you're good to go. Everything else is extra and can quite easily become part of your writing process
Thanks Ben. Many have now said I was able to keep is simple, but yet useful, so seems that my attempt to show that SEO doesn't have to be hard has been successful :)
As an additional tip – to save time, I keep an idea file where I write blog post and headline ideas. I go through the list every now and then and “rank” my own ideas and pick the ones I'll most likely actually write something. I then do the keyword research on one go for 5-10 post ideas. It takes couple of minutes to find one keyword phrase for each idea and couple of related phrases as secondary phrases. I then write/edit the headlines to include the main phrase on the idea file.
This way I don't have to go and do keyword research every time I start writing, I just pick the headline/idea and the keywords are already there. Then I can just write :)
WOW!!!
I'm floored not only this is an excellent post explaining how to write SEO-friendly-posts, but it's so timely because I'm revisiting the way I write all my posts moving forward.
Thanks for being so detailed because I can simply use this post as a successful guide.
Thanks a lot Antti for sharing!
Krizia
Excellent post –really helpful for us “non-techies!” It's very difficult to have a successful blog if you aren't technical, and can't afford to pay someone to be technical for you. Having great information like you provided in a step-by-step format is really helpful. I am going to try to incorporate your suggestions in all of my posts going forward. Thanks!
Thank you for the comment Krizia, here's hoping you'll see good results after putting these simple techniques into use.
p.s. I recommend you use either your real name, first name or initials as your blog commenter name. You'll see much better results for your blog commenting that way. And in fact, for my blog, it's in the comment policy. I prefer discussing with Krizia, not your web site name :)
Thanks for the comment. May I ask why you're using such an anonymous “name”? Just “Lisa” would be way better. (and do include your website link if you have one).
Thanks for a clear explanation. – even thought I 'know' all of this, I forget to do it! I'm headed back to update a few of my posts!
Hi Antti,
A superb post and so quick to the point, thank you.
Would you know how much effect does Google page ranking have on geeting your post to the top on chosen key words?
thx, Lance
Hi Michelle. Try making it a habit, that's worked for me. I start every post with the title (and include main keyword phrase in it) and after that it's all natural. The same thing with handling images for example, it doesn't take any additional time to use keywords in the image name, but over time, it will help a lot.
Hi Lance. Did you mean Google PageRank (PR)? It does affect the search engine rankings a bit, so with *all* other things being equal, PR4 site will be higher than PR1. But by itself, it doesn't mean anything really, you can get to number#1 with PR0 site/page.
So no need to pay that much attention to the PR. You'll see it go up eventually when you do the right things, like creating unique content regularly.
Great post, really enjoyed it. One thing I've never been clear on though is anchor text. I know it's great for the site you're linking to if using desirable keywords, and good for accessibility and screen readers, but how useful for SEO to your own post is it to use correct/good anchor text for external links? Thanks for the very clear article!
Joel, thanks for your comment and great question too! In short, it's very, very useful to use good anchor text for all links. And when you think about it, it makes sense, links are, or at least should be, very clear signs on what the page is about (just like the title tag and the H1 headline)…
Firstly, when there is a link on a blog post, why the link is there? It's either: a) reference/source, or b) further reading. So the link will help the search engine understand what the page is about. Google especially is the master of collecting “related” data, and the pages you link to will relate and be related to with your page…
The anchor text will make it clear where that link is going to. It's like a roadsign in a sense, and search engines seem to like it when we place clear roadsigns and tell others where they end up if they click. And the search engine will see the page as a place to find all those roadsigns, which is probably good for people who are lost and look for that information, so it ranks it higher for related searches.
That's the theory and how I see it anyway :) So again, good anchor text is very important for both internal and external links.
Thanks for the awesome tips. I'll be sure to incorporate them into my blog immediately!
Good answer thanks. I try to use anchor likes like that naturally but besides readability I never really thought about them actually helping my article. So thanks again.
Interesting post Antti. You've got some really good tips there for SEO. I particular apply this to my blog posts: “manually edit the post permalink” as I find that sometimes my headings are too long, so I shorten them so the permalink doesn't look too long.
Will take into consideration the other tips you recommend….
One point to note is I recently heard from Ed Dale who was interviewing a few SEO experts and they say Google is beginning to change their search engine results and will be pushing for “paid” listings much more than “organic” listings, which means SEO may not be as important in the upcoming months. The most important way to be listed in Google's search is to become an authoritative blog in your market and to dominate it.
What are your thoughts?
I think the inclusion of “social circle” and real-time results are more important to SEO than seeing too many paid listings. This makes participating in the social media one kind of SEO too…
But I have the highest respect for Ed, so I'm afraid there must be something in that interview you heard. Paid or free, the front page of Google is getting filled with other listings which are not that static (paid listings, the social circle, real-time search, news, etc.), and these days you have to be in the top 5-7 instead of the old top 10 to make it to front page. And soon, it might be top 3 for some terms.
But there is two part solution for this. One being what you mentioned, becoming an authoritative blog and just dominating the market. Second being fresh content. The importance of regular content become more and more important. Already now, Google values fresh content more than before.
All in all, I think the best SEO is and will be awesome, up-to-date and highly useful content (and using the principles like the ones this post will just help it even further).
What fantastic post. It covers the – for me – most important steps to follow (keyword research, integrating the found keywords into your headline and text, linking and descriptions). I have paid a lot to get this knowledge but I am happy, that it available for free now!
One think I'd like to add is that I have heard that you should not use headings “smaller” than h3 (so no h4 and so on). What do you think about that? Also I find it very interesting – when it comes to writing for the user – to enrich your articles with headlines and images so they are not only pure text.
Using the subheadlines is good if you have already used the “higher” ones. It's like writing well structured white paper or article, subheadlines structure the whole thing for both the search engines and the readers.
So I think it's very good practice to use plenty of sub-headlines – I use H2, H3 and H4 on my blog posts. If I would write a reeaally long blog post, I would probably go for H5 and H6 too, after all, that's what they are there for.
But even then, the most important keywords would be in the main headline (H1), subheadlines wouldn't matter that much for SEO (but it's still good practice to use them)
Hey Antti! You've updated your theme – nice and clean :).
You know I love SEO talk and I was excited to read your post. You definitely pointed out all of the important steps that need to be taken in order to optimize a blog.
I do have to put my input in on one particular part. You mentioned linking out to other websites as a form of building authority and rankings for your own site. I have never heard about this form of link optimization.
Every time you link to another page, you share your PageRank with that page, so I would NOT recommend linking out as much as possible.
How does linking to a quality site actually increase your authority? What if I had a Viagra site and I link to Wikipedia? I don't believe that would make my Viagra site stronger SEO wise. From everything I've learned, it's not about who you link to – it's about who links to you. Otherwise, any spammer could simply link to every quality site on the Internet and become an authority.
I would love to hear your points on this!
Thanks Keller for the comment. Linking out to trustworthy / authoritative sites is a tricky thing, but it does work… It's a theory I've been working on, but it's not something I made up, others think the same way:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-reasons-you-should...
http://www.seobook.com/outbound-linking-fun-and...
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/linking-out-google...
Of course, linking out won't “save” your otherwise shady site, e.g. a blue pill site you mentioned as an example, but showing Google that you agree with them on what sites are good for a topic (in the anchor text), they seem to love you back.
And the other thing is, what do “honest” web pages do that spammers don't? They link!! Spammers ONLY link to the things they're trying to sell, or they don't link at all in hopes to get AdSense clicks – Search Engines have noticed this and value sites that do what is right = link out.
More proof? What are the most authoritative sites online? Directories, right? And pages like Wikipedia that link out like crazy. Perhaps it's time for us bloggers to take a notice.
Become a hub and the ultimate source of information for a subject (which you achieve by linking out to all the best sources) and there's a chance YOU become the authority for that subject (for making the research and finding all those great sources).
p.s. I changed the colors of my theme yes (thanks for noticing!), as the gray coloring started to get old and depressing, so I needed something cheerful, thus – green it is for now :)
Rich, unfortunately I have to delete your comment unless you go and change the commenter name. “Link Money” comes of as SPAM and it's against my comment policy.
Krizia. I will have to delete your blog comment unless you come and change the blog commenter “name” (or leave a new comment with more real name). Using a website name is against my comment policy (I much more prefer Krizia). Thanks for understanding.
I would say the reason directories are authoritative is because of how many websites link to them – not how many they link to.
It's an interesting discussion and I want to learn more about it. Like I said, I've never come across this concept, so I'm definitely eager to learn more!
BTW: Please feel free to remove the “V” word from my comment – I should have been more vague and not used that term.
Hmm, you are probably right about the directories now that I think of it. The guys at SEOmoz have been talking about it, and I suggest you take a look at those links on the previous comment.
p.s. edited your comment as requested, although I think with Disqus you can go and edit them yourself too.
What's the difference between image alt tags and image title tags in terms of SEO?
The image title-attribute (not to be confused with the title tag) is far less significant for SEO than the alt-text. The title can even be ignored in terms of SEO. However, in most browsers, the text in the title-attribute will be shown as a tool-tip = can be relevant for users, not so much for SEO.
The image alt-text affects the on-page SEO, alt-text is used for image-search, alt-text is the “anchor-text” if the image is a link, etc.
Thus, image title-attribute could be “call to action” when alt-attribute should always describe the image with a good keyword phrase.
The image title-attribute (not to be confused with the title tag) is far less significant for SEO than the alt-text. The title can even be ignored in terms of SEO. However, in most browsers, the text in the title-attribute will be shown as a tool-tip = can be relevant for users, not so much for SEO.
The image alt-text affects the on-page SEO, alt-text is used for image-search, alt-text is the “anchor-text” if the image is a link, etc.
Thus, image title-attribute could be “call to action” when alt-attribute should always describe the image with a good keyword phrase.
This is really a good post on using SEO writing. your article suggest the effective way of writing SEO blog. i try to do most of your tips. It really help to understand the difference between inter and outer linking.
regards
data recovery
http://www.datadoctor.biz
SEO, or search engine optimization, consists of two parts; on-page and off-page SEO.
The on-page search engine ranking factors are the things on your blog and on your pages.
The off-page factors are the things outside your domain, e.g. links back to your site.
social bookmarking
Very good advice. So many yelling that SEO is dead, while guys like you keep writing paragraphs of content that are drawing free visitors. I guess the more they think this way, the better it is for the rest of us.
test
That first thing that we should consider before we write SEO blog is choose good keyword and description for it. Because keyword is the most important thing to promote your blog effectively.