This little chap is googlebot,  make him your best blogging buddy, he has some very influential friends don’t you know!

Whether you are a work at home mum, a student crafting from your bedroom or a multi-billion pound company with offices at Canary Wharf, the same principles apply with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  The goal is to ‘optimise’ your site so that search engines think your content is really relevant for your chosen keywords and bring you traffic for free.  We like FREE!

Take a look over the last few posts in our new blogging basics series if you are starting a new blog for the first time, or need some tips to boost your blogging confidence.

Googles Webmaster Central pages are invaluable for finding great information on all aspects of SEO and alot more.   There are so many tips for getting found on the internet, and not many are original so you are best to go directly to the source and learn from what google itself has to say, rather than the ‘seo experts’ and all their not so free e-books and pop-ups asking you to subscribe to various emails.  An important thing to remember about any work you do towards SEO is that it won’t necessarily lead to instant results.  It can take months to build up links and good content, but with a little and often approach you will start to see the benefits.

Bloggers that write naturally because they are passionate about their subject can do very well as they are exactly what google and the army of googlebots that index all the content on the web are looking for.  If you are an authority on a subject the keywords will flow naturally.  Genuine websites offering results that Google  can serve up in response to peoples search queries.

Search engines use all sorts of formulas and algorithms to determine search results, however the two main factors to consider are:

• Relevant links that point back to your site (especially from descriptive anchor text – that’s when text becomes a clickable link)
• Relevant keywords in your urls, titles, content and tags

Identify the keywords  and keyphrases you want to be connected with – get out a pencil and paper and start playing the word association game. Better still use one of the free keyword tools available – Google keyword tool is good – just type in a word or phrase and see where you get to,

It’s not as simple as “I sell bags, therefore I want to be first page for the keyword ‘bags’  and so I will use the word bag or bags every other word”  over 16 million people searched for ‘bag‘ last month – it’s a waste of your time to try and compete with wikipedia! So think about trying to get up in the search engine results for key phrases instead. You could try to be top for the phrase ‘ergonomic shoulder bag’ or ‘retro accessories’ – only you know best the market you are aiming your products at.  Try and place these keywords naturally within the text.  It’s always worth reading over a post before publishing to see if there are any missed opportunities to use one of your keywords or phrases.  Check, titles, headings, content and tags/categories/labels – could any of them be tweaked?

You need to think broadly about what sort of things your potential customers will be interested in reading.  You will then have the opportunity to use your keywords naturally.  More often than not it’s likely that customers will share your own interests so it wont be too much of a stretch. If it feels like you are writing outside of your comfort zone, take stock and think about what you are really interested in – if it’s just the sheer love of making your crafts then write about that, blogging should be enjoyable.  With each post that appears to a new reader you have another person who has seen your sidebar advert, scrolled to the ‘shop update’ post or clicked through to your shop.

Also look at our shop front articles on increasing traffic to your online shop and our google analytics basics posts which will further help you understand how to analyse your SEO techniques.

We’ll look at this further next week as there are lots more technical tweaks to discuss – in the mean time let us know what you find most difficult about blogging! Technical stuff, content or promotion?