SEO can be very elusive to some, but its downright something that all bloggers should concentrate on if monetization is a goal. If you are not in a niche market, targeted SEO can be very difficult and often comes post by post. The key is not get lackadaisical about setting it up before you hit that publish button.

I admit that I can be extremely lazy in this aspect on my own personal blog and its cost me big numbers over the years.

Sometimes publishing up to 3-5 articles a day for your audience can make you jump the gun and ignore the tags, the keywords, and the elements that will give you long term respect in the search engines, whose affects will last well beyond your initial audience.

Here are 5 tips to SEO your posts for some google love.

SEO Tip #1) Get your own domain. As much as google and wordpress wanna rope you in with their .blogspot and .wordpress, the only ones they are doing any favor to, is them. Regardless of what platform you are on, nothing can take the place of a top level domain in a .com .

Sure, if you have to settle for a .net (.org and .edu also get good rankings if they are relevant) then do, but nothing takes the place of a good old .com. Aside from the fact that it’s, well, the most known ending of all websites, the chances of being confused with another website with the same name won’t be one of your worries as you grow.

Finding something that is in your niche, a keyword likely to be typed in and tied into what you are selling or speaking about, and of course easy to remember and spell, is imperative to long term success. Not only will it be your branding, but a domain name is a direct reflection of the amount and type of visitors you get from search engine traffic.

When I set out to name my blog, I knew I wanted the word “mom” in my domain somehow. I wanted it to be unique, short, and as easy as possible to remember. It took about 10 trial names before I settled on “MomDot.com”, which was my clever rendition of Mom(dot)com. The biggest issue I have found with my name is that when I am speaking it, it takes a bit to have people understand.

Mom.com? No, MomDOT(dot)com!

• Tip #1A) I didn’t really think out the implications of the spoken word and often get caught up myself explaining my own name. Make sure you say your new domain out-loud before you purchase it.

1. Does it sound normal?
2. Is it easy to say, easy to explain?
3. If you were on the phone with a PR rep or a radio station,would it come out clearly?

• Tip #1B) As mentioned before, a domain is also a brand. Think long and hard on your brand. Do you want to reflect a business, a personal interest, a product, yourself? Its a lot easier to find a domain and establish it right the first time, then it is to get 6 months into it and change. Don’t jump the gun on purchasing something you are excited about, then later realizing it didn’t fit the overall goal and you have to start over. Page ranks are assigned per domain, so starting over could mean losing links, page ranks, and even recognition.

I know because at conferences, people call me “MomDot”, and not Trisha, quite often.

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SEO Tip #2) Think long and hard about your post titles. What you write in your title are the keywords that search engines give the most weight to. Its very easy to disregard your title and opt for something quick, easy, or cute, but titling something “my tips” as opposed to “Top 10 SEO tips for mom bloggers”, will pretty much insure your article begins and ends after you publish.

Search engines crawlers decide that your titles, the largest parts of each post that are generally bolded and in a bigger text, mean more. Remember a spider (also known as a robot or web crawler) reads your site by text, so the larger and closer to the top a word is, the more the search engines believe that is what your site, and essential your content, is about.

Here is a sample from my personal mom blog:

In the first graphic, you can see a post I wrote yesterday on Charlotte. While its a good conversationalist topic and asks a question, which inspires a comment response, as far as long term click throughs on that article, its going to be almost none when its off the front page.

Now on the 2nd article, you can see a comparison review I did back in December 1st, 2008 for Dyson. I opted for a keyword phrase for the title that most people would type in, which was comparing the two top lines of that vacuum out at the time.  Its been over a year and the second article still accounts for daily search engine clicks for my site.

Now imagine if you did that with the thousands of posts you write per year?

You are most likely missing out on 100’s of visitors that will never see your site because you didn’t take the extra 3 minutes it takes to SEO a post before you published.

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SEO Tip #3) Don’t ignore the permalinks:  Most people call them pretty permalinks. There is nothing worse then a permalink that is “http://www.yoursite.com/products/date/productname/bunchofjunkyoudontneed/post.htm

Not only is that nearly impossible for people to tweet (including you) without going to bit.ly (which unless its your mom they wont do for you, so your missing traffic in social networking too) but its also extremely unfriendly for a spider.

Remember, the closer to the top, the closer to the beginning, the more weight it gives. That means your domain name gets the weight, then the next word, then the next word.

Provided what your content is actually about is the LAST word, google may not even care by the time it goes through 9 words on your permalink. If your article is on “widgets” it needs to be ‘Hhtp://www.sitename.com/widget” .

The end.

Lets say your entire site is about that one widget and thats all you write. Change it up and use alternate keywords, phrases, and likely search terms that visitors will type in to find you.

A pretty permalink looks like this:

This should also, again, show you how important your domain name is.

You can search what users are typing into the search engines and find out keywords and alternate phrases at Google Keywords.

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SEO Tip #4) Everyone forgets about the pictures. Its easy to do.  But pictures are content. You upload them from your memory card and they are named picture234324.jpg and when you add to your site, you don’t even consider changing the name or adding alternate text.

Stop doing that right now.

Pictures, if named properly, can bring more relevance to your article. If you are doing a post on “Graco Strollers” and want to share a picture of a graco stroller, by all means NAME it gracostroller.jpg and put some alternate text on it like “Top Graco Stroller for 2009″.

Pictures are crawled and put into image search engines. I once had a picture in Bing send 17,000 unique visitors to my site in one day because it was the #1 picture term looked up that day in some freak story online and I was the #1 picture in Bing for it.

Yes, 17,000.

The post was extremely old, but the picture was SEOed properly. What would have happened if I had just left that photo named img1923923.jpg? I wouldn’t have been indexed for that term and I would have missed out on some major exposure.

If you are on wordpress, this is your screen when you upload a picture….there is a reason all of that is there. USE IT.

Also, when you are adding pictures, surround the picture itself with text that contains keywords and excellent content. Again, let me point out that a robot spider is crawling your page, not a real person, so you have to lead it to what your post is about.

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SEO Tip #5) Don’t forget about them keywords: Using keywords in your posts are important. Remember to think about what you would type in to the search engine to find your post.

Would it be a “how to bake a cake”, would it be “top chocolate cake recipes”?

Start using those phrases and words embedded in your post correctly. Use them as lead ins to your paragraphs, connect them in your permalinks and post titles, and give it a really good sprinkling of healthy terms.

• Tip #5A) Do not pad your post with all the same search term. Search engines call this “stuffing” and it can actually hurt you. While you may want the search term “mom blog”, don’t just use that phrase.
• Use mom blogs, mom blogger, mommy blogs, top moms online, influential blogs, etc.  Its also better to seek out lesser used search terms where you are likely to capture the majority of the audience. You may be competing with 1000’s of sites with the word “mom blog” but maybe only a few hundred with the term “top mom blogger”. I would rather capture the majority of the 100 people that are typing in the latter, then 10 out of the 1000 that type in the larger name of ‘mom blog’.
• Tip #5B) While I would never recommend a misspelled word in a blog, there are many words that are commonly misspelled and consequently mistyped, into the search engine. Naming a photo or an atl text with the common misspelling can bring you search engine results to those typing it in wrong.

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• Bonus Tip)  Meta Tags: Your blog has a name. Your blog has a description. Again, where you put each word is where google ranks it. Its not a smart idea to put your business/blog name first in those title tags unless you are really known as that name and that will be your search engine type in key words.

Again, use words that people will type in to find your site in your blog title AND in your blog description.

In my example of my mom blog, you can see that I have chosen to put the term “mom blog” at the beginning, my site name second, and my personal name last. Now in my description, I am constantly changing it. I used to be on the front page of google for “Mom Blogs” and now I am on the top of the 2nd page simply because I was testing new description key words.

It makes a difference.

Another thing to point out is the term “mom blogs” is NOT the term “mom blog”. You have to SEO for the exact terms you want. In my case, taking out the terms ‘public relations’ and ‘media’ would be smart as the majority of my site isn’t related to that, and instead adding keywords that will be better for my personal site.

You can find out what your site says about you at this FREE META TAG ANALYZER. Just plugin your domain name and voila. Now you know what the spiders see. If you don’t like what it says, use this Meta Tag Generator to fix, and then add to your header in your blog.

If you are on Wordpress, you can also use plugins like All in One SEO, which is a very flexible and easy way to get this done.

Bonus Tip #A) Don’t think that you can add keywords that have nothing to do with your site. Just because the word “sex” gets a lot of google type in per month, doesn’t mean you can throw that in your title, permalink, and site description and its going to bring you 1 million sex addicts. Your content still has to be relevant to what you use. Google is wise to fake keywords, so they wont give you weight unless your site is, in fact, about sex. Make sense?

Now this article could go on atleast another 20 paragraphs in SEO tips, but another tip is, don’t cram everything into one article at the same time. Break it up so your spiders can read it properly and so your visitor doesn’t get bored and quit reading.

I sincerely hope this was helpful and check back for upcoming tech articles and more SEO tips in the future. If you liked this article or found it helpful, we would appreciate a tweet or a link so other mom bloggers can be inspired.

To your success!

~Trisha