Last time I left you with five (ok, 5 and a bonus and then some,) Easy SEO tips you can be applying to your blog right now to bring in more traffic. Unfortunately, that article got so long, I had to break it up into a second post, so here are the rest of my tips to assist you in nailing down some mom blogger SEO.

While tons of traffic wont always equal tons of money, it does allow you the first step in capitalizing on CPM ads. For a site with a lot of page views, CPM can be the bread and butter backbone of a steady online paycheck.

Just to refresh your memory, our last 5 Easy SEO Tips were

• 1) Get a domain
• 2) Post titles
• 3) Permalinks
• 4) Picture SEO
• 5) Keywords & Tags
• * bonus tip Site description and mega tag analyzer.

Now onto the next  5 6!

6) Content Relevance and Niche Writing: Let’s start with relevance. Think about it. What the search engines are trying to do is find the most relevant site to send to the person typing in the key word.  Their job is to connect someone to the best information online to what they are researching.

So as a blogger, if I write an article about *hairy legs*, but my site is generally about cooking why would Google ever send me a person looking up hairy legs?  They most likely wont without some work or some luck. They instead want to send people looking up cooking. Makes sense, right? Hey, knowing is half the battle people.

When you are a mom blogger, this can be very hard.

Mom Bloggers write about a variety of products, household situations, and personal life, and it can truly be a melting pot of content.  While you may hit the jackpot on a few specialized posts, chances of major google traffic on everything isn’t going to happen. Its important to niche as much as possible, or at the very least corner the market on a few specific  phrases and deep link yourself within your own site to create a sense of relevance.

If your goal is to make money and you are not doing it via CPM from all the wonderful people wanting to read about your life, niche writing is the best way to do it.

Find your passion and create a site around it. The more specialized, the more specific traffic, ads, and affiliates you will attract.

7) Deep Linking: Let’s go back to that hairy leg example. Now lets say I generally don’t write about hairy legs, but right now, I have found it a worthwhile topic of discussion.  What I can do is create 2 or 3 hairy leg articles like “How to Get rid of Hairy legs”, “Does Nair Work?”, and “What Causes Hairy Legs” and connect them all inside my blog by linking each one to the next using a variety of key words. Btw, dont use the same keywords over and over and over again. Mix it up.

This will give me some relevance, even if its not my niche, and Google will have mercy on my soul and probably toss me some Hairy Leg searchers.

Applying that to mom blogging, lets say that you are someone that flops around on what you write. Try to find some of the common denominators of those articles and connect them to each other.  Connect your coupon posts to your coupon posts, your cooking to your cooking, etc. Make sure you dont just connect them by a simple phrase like “check out my other articles here” but use your links for keyword relevance. Say something like “More Chocolate Recipes Here” and link the words *Chocolate Recipes* to your chocolate recipe article.

Get it?

Here is an example of deep linking that I used in this article. I connected to my last SEO article and used the appropriate keywords, therefore giving myself more weight on my own article.

8 ) Stressing Words: We have talked before about the higher up, the larger a word,  the closer to the top it is, the more weight the search engines will value what you are saying. Remember spiders read your content when it comes to the search engines, not a real person, so take care where you add stressing marks like bolding, colors, underlining, and italicize.

When you title a post within the content, center, bold and make it a H1 or H2 in size, google will pick up those keywords stronger. Titling a post inside the post prior to your article can be a great way to capitalize on a few extra search engine hits.

Here is an example of adding more weight and letting search engines separate specific words from the rest of the content:

9) Stop stressing over page rank: No, really. Stop it. Yes, it can have some bearing if lets say you are a 1 and I am a 7 and we both post about “ferrets wearing clothes”.

But with good niche content, your post could have just as much relevance and ranking in the search engines.  So stop putting your mom blog heart into that little number. Its gonna go up, its gonna go down.

In fact, I am pretty sure Google lets monkeys consult a Ouija board to decide when they come to your site.

If you want a solid page rank, simply create fresh content, deep link yourself, use basic SEO, NICHE your writing, and get other sites to link up with your keywords.

Voila. C’est Pagerank.

10) Linkbaiting: Ah, linkbaiting. I am sure I am going to catch hell for this tip. Linkbating is a beautiful way to get people to talk about you. Its exactly what it sounds like. You get people to link you by baiting them with a topic. Sometimes that topic can be serious, it can be helpful, it can be controversial, but the point is to get them to use a specific keyword and link your page back.

Great ways for mom bloggers to do that is to talk about other mom bloggers. No, I don’t mean in a bad way (although that works too), but more like “Top 10 Mom Blogs of February”. If you are  a design site, use  “Top Best Blog Designs”, etc. Generally people who are mentioned in those articles link back on their site to show off that they were listed (I know I do when I am listed) and it gives you the keywords in the title and your site linked, thereby adding Google weight to your site for those words.

And lets not forget about the traffic it can produce.

Let me break it down a little more. Lets say you run an article called “Top Mom Blogs on Twitter” and list 25 mom blogs. I see my name. I post on my site, “Look, I made the Top Mom Blogs on Twitter” and link back to YOUR article.

You have “linkbaited” me.

You have secured the keywords “top mom blogs” right on my site and I have given the search engine relevance to find you under those words.

You can also use Linkbaiting in fun ways too. Lets say you host a celebrity site. You may want to run an article on “Top 5 Celebrity Men I would Love to go on a Date with” and add a cutesy article. Others find it funny, link up, and you get the words “celebrity men” pointing to you. If you are a discount site, do an article on “Coupons that don’t exist but should” and make it funny…like $10,000 off Mercedes. People will link to the article if its written well and you will get the word “Coupons” linked back to your page.

MomDot caught some flack last year for people running rapid stating the PR Blackout was a linkbaiting stunt. I wont deny it worked out extremely nice for the blog, but it wasn’t a linkbaiting stunt. If it was, I would have named it with some keywords in it. That’s the key to linkbaiting.

People pay thousands of dollars a year for links but there are so many ways to get them for free.

11) Trade your blog name for a keyword: I hate to break your heart, but when you are listing on the search engines, the name of your blog is probably going to be the least searched thing out there to find your content. Lets say I have a blog called “Trisha’s Awesome Closet” and I talk about fashion and clothes. Why in the hell would I want the keywords Trisha’s Awesome Closet stinking up my search engine results?

I don’t.

Especially in one of the most important places my site holds keywords.

When you add an SEO Plugin, the easiest way to solve this and gain some additional traction is to rename your site to something that does not include your blog name (provided your blog does not contain your targeted keywords)….like “Clothing and Fashion for Moms” in place of “Trisha’s Awesome Closet”.

We use ALL IN ONE SEO plugin here on TMB and this is an example of the simplicity of changing what the search engines see. Try different keywords and adjust where your results are appearing in the search engines until you are happy:

12 *bonus*) Link to others with the same type of content to become THE topic authority: Last but not least I want to mention linking to others with authority. You can write an entire article on something but what Google really likes is if you link to others as well! Lets go back to the Hairy Legs example. I don’t know why but that cracks me up. So I am writing three articles on Hairy legs.

Then I take some time out to do some research ON hairy legs and I link up 15 sites where others have talked about hairy legs and I link them. Out of kindness, I give them some keywords too (I try to avoid giving them the ones I am working on though personally) and connect my reader to all these other sites that would help them out.

This not only assists your reader, but tells Google you are serious about the topic because you are connecting to other pages that also have that  same kind of content on it. Remember, spiders are reading your article, not a real person, so if they are going through your pages and it feeds and reads the links and sees yes, she is linking to other hairy leg articles, they are going to love me for it.

OK, that’s it, another round of fabulously easy SEO tips.

Leave your comments and questions below and I will answer them as I see them. And if this article helped you, please consider stumbling or tweeting (or linking, lol).

~Trisha