First of all SEO (Search engine optimization) involves many factors, for beginners hoping to gain some organic traffic (and make money from Adsense) from search engines, mainly google, there are some simple things that you can do today to help your blog get listed

The first thing you need to do is set up some type of stastistic tracking for your blog, if you haven’t done this already I recommend Google Analytics, its very easy to set up and you can find out a lot of information about where your traffic is coming from and what your visitors like (and don’t like) about your blog, simply go to google analytics and set up your tracking code

Getting traffic to your blog

This post is a follow up to Make more money from your blog with google adsense and the SEO tips here relate to that post but are also  all tips that you should use for your blog to help increase traffic, for adsense or not

First off if you want to rank in google for a certain keyword (usually the topic of your blog) you need to have your keyword in your url, for example if you are writing a blog about “cats” your url should have the word “cats” in it, many people will write a blog about something they are interested in (like cats) but the url will be “www.my-name.blogspot.com”, using your name as your url is fine, if you are writing a personal blog about yourself, but if you want to be found when people search for information on cats, you should have cats in there.

Secondly for the purpose of search engines you should have your keyword(s) included in every post title, not the same title for each post, but titles with your keyword added, like “feeding your cat”, “breeds of cats” etc.

Also you should only list one post per page – not only does this help with load time, it also helps google give you more targeted ads on your blog

You should name all your images, got a photo of your cat you want to add to a post? dont add it as  ”image32″ name your images like “siamese cat”, “cat nap” etc.

Keyword stuffing

Ok this is important, as much as you will gain from using your keywords in your url, post titles and images, do not over-do it, you should use your keywords in your post content, where relevent, if you are writing about anything related to your keyword this should occur naturally, if you think “ok I am going to add loads of mentions of my keyword in my post and I’ll get on the first page really quickly” you are keyword stuffing, don’t mention your keyword too much, you can be penalised by the search engines for this.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic – traffic that comes from search engines is what every blogger should aim for, social traffic from social networks is fine if you want a few readers but it won’t go very far, the internet is huge, you could gain a lot of new readers/visitors from your search results that you just won’t get from social networking, so to get organic traffic you need to get found

Backlinks

Backlinks are important for search results, a link to your blog from somewhere else on the net is considered a vote for your blog – this is the most important type of link, link exchanges have some value (where you link to someone else’s blog and they link to your’s) if the blogs are about a related topic, but one way links to your blog are much better.  There is no simple way to get quality backlinks (that I know of) many people say if you write usefull content people will naturally link to you, for the moment, write your content, visit other blogs on your topics and leave a comment if you have anything valuable to add (don’t spam), it is likely that others will click your name if you leave an interesting comment and you gain a visitor and potential new reader

SEO – So much more

There is so much more about SEO that you can learn, this post is just a basic overview but if you are a beginner to search engine optimization its a good place to start, if you really want to know all the in’s and outs of SEO there is an excellent website (very comprehensive) about linkbuilding, keywords, making money and much more – a very interesting read, visit SEO Zombie