Ever do a search and the results eventually led you to a page that looked like just a bunch of the same words over and over again? That’s some “genius” loading up on keywords trying to increase search engine ranking.

“If every sentence has the phrase “lose weight fast”, that has to be bad right?”

“Does it really work?”

“Is there a secret formula?”

“How do we measure the keywords and keyword phrases within an article?”

Straight from the Office of Phrases-That-Never-Existed-Before-Search-Engines, the answer to that last question is keyword density. By definition, it’s simply the percentage a keyword or keyword phrases compared with the rest of the words in an article. Keyword stuffing is when you bloat your article with a lot of unnecessary keywords.

A quick look at keyword density

This is what happens when you think about keyword density instead of writing naturally.

You don’t need me to tell you that if every sentence has the same keyword phrase in it, that’s bad! Even if the keyword stuffing actually worked, your article would be unreadable. No one in their right mind would stay longer than two seconds before clicking the Back button.

There are so many “experts” out there who will recommend a certain keyword density. Some say go with no more than 20% (which is really insane), while others swear by staying under 5%. What do I recommend? How about writing for your audience and not for search engines?

Keyword density penalty

At the end of the day, your article has to have some keywords and keyword phrases. But that’s just common sense. As you write your article, you will naturally populate it with keywords.  Think about it, try writing an article about affiliate marketing but never mention the keyword phrase ‘affiliate marketing’ ever. It’s impossible!

Those of you who are worried that search engines will penalize you for not having enough keywords, stop worrying. First of all, no one knows the algorithms for any of the major search engines. Even if someone did, that algorithm would potentially change in a month’s time anyway. The rumor mill actually states that Google is particularly more harsh on keyword stuffing than Yahoo and others but no one knows how much more.

Final thoughts on keyword density

The bottom line is this: no one knows exactly how much keyword density to use. When in doubt, just write something worth reading for your audience. Don’t worry about how many keywords there are on the page, where they are placed, or how many alternative keyword phrases you have. Instead, focus on whether or not your post provides value for your visitors.

After all, we’re all looking to build a user base for our blog and the only way to keep them coming back is to have interesting articles. You can’t do that if you’re thinking about keyword density!

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I know, that’s my sad attempt in creating my own word. Hmmm, makes me want to patent that. Wait, should it be blorganic or bloganic?

Anyway, how many of you have made a sad attempt in growing your blog or website? Judging by the questions I get from here, the posts made by many folks on various forums, and the insane amount of marketing about SEO shortcuts and alike, I’m guessing many of us have tried fast track our way to success.

There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Look, I’m guilty as well. Even though I firmly believe nothing will work in the long-term other than growing your blog organically, I’m still curious enough to see if someone has figured out some magic formula. My expectations are usually very low otherwise I would be disappointed every time.

In my opinion, if you’re an individual or small company, save your time and money and ignore those ads! Things like buying backlinks or link exchanges may work well for the big guys trying to move up on SERP but they won’t do much to sustain success for the small fry.

How to grow your blog organically

• Write quality articles consistently
• Comment on other like-niche sites
• Write guest articles on other like-niche sites
• Participate on dofollow forums

Really, that’s all there is to it. That said, doing all of those things will take a lot of time. But hey, if you can make it past the painful period of writing for an audience of one (usually at least three months), then it will pay off.

Notice I didn’t specifically state that you should seek out dofollow sites to comment and write guest articles for. Although I prefer dofollow, the real purpose of those activities are to spread the word about your expertise and build relationships with people. A dofollow backlink would simply be a bonus.

In other words, you are doing work to create a natural following. No gimmicks; just your own personal sweat equity. That’s what I call being blorganic.

So are you blorganic?

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If I gave every visitor just one guess, even though there are many amazing choices, I’m pretty sure an overwhelming majority of you would say that the most reputable company in the US is Google. And you would be right!

According to Harris Interactive, who surveyed 30,000 people and asked them to identify and rate companies, Google beat out other tech contenders like Apple, Amazon, Intel, Sony, and Microsoft. This was their 12th annual Reputation Quotient Survey.

Now what exactly does this mean to bloggers? Well, at a minimum it reinforces the fact that Google is the apple of the US visitors’ eyes. Despite all of their new ventures, Google’s core business is still its search engine, which is obviously the most trusted search source.

Although there are a plethora of metrics used today, such as Alexa, Complete, and Google PageRank (PR), I continue to use Google as a gauge to tell me how well my sites are faring. That means checking to see where I stand with the keywords that I’m looking for matches on. Of course, I keep my fingers on the pulse of each of my sites’ PRs as well since that’s what advertisers look for.

However, from the user perspective, the most important perspective, I want to ensure that my visitors get what they are looking for. I provide original content – articles that are typically hot topics for those looking to learn more about blogging and running websites, and making sure that the potential visitors can find me on Google.

Yes, I’m guilty. I totally ignore where my sites rank on Bing and Yahoo. I’ve always viewed it as if my sites are doing well on Google, the other search engines will surely be similar. And even if they’re not, Google is the one I care about the most anyway. I’m getting the biggest bang for my buck by spending my time checking to see my SERP on Google only.

How about you folks out there. Do you care about any other rankings other than Google’s?

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Picture this. You’re at a casual dinner party and you have a friendly discussion on healthy activities. The next day, your friend sends you a link to your work email address that says “Read this!”. You click it and it brings you to an article that discusses an activity that the two of you didn’t think of the other night. No problem, right?

Well, the title of the article is “Good Sex Is Good For You!” and the article link is http://www.selfhelpmagazine.com/articles/good-sex.php. Uhm, you’re at work! The title isn’t a problem but why couldn’t the link just end in with an article number like 18220.html?

That link is called a permalink. It’s the URL of an article, blog post, or any other page that’s not the home page. How does this affect bloggers? Two critical ways…

• Permalinks should have keywords. It may not have mattered much back in the static era of 1994 but today, your posts should have keywords since they could potentially increase traffic. The right permalink format could tell web crawlers a lot about the page and most search engine algorithms grant higher rank positions for good permalinks. This very basic SEO tactic is one that every blogger should implement. Permalinks with keywords = search engine smiles.
• Permalinks are called permalinks for a reason…they’re permanent! That means if you change a link for your post from http://freebloghelp.com/524 to http://freebloghelp.com/whos-afraid-of-outbound-links, the former still exists in search engines’ eyes even though the content had been moved to another resting place. Dead links = search engine frowns.

So what can a blogger do? Let’s start with getting it right the first time. If you’re using WordPress.org, you’re in luck. Your default post will have a permalink that looks like http://freebloghelp.com/524 so you’ll want to change the default permalink structure. Here’s one way to do it:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard
2. Click on Settings on the left nav
3. Click on Permalinks on the left sub nav
4. Click the Custom Structure radio button under Common Settings
5. Type /%postname%/

Changing permalink default structure in WordPress is easy

Now you know why that article had “good sex” in the permalink!

If you’ve already started letting your blog platform name your posts, it’s still not too late to retrofit them. Check out these WordPress permalink plugins.

Dean’s Permalinks Migration – With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.

Search Permalink – The Search Permalink plugin redirects HTTP GET requests in the form of http://example.com/blog/?s=foo to http://example.com/blog/search/foo/ may it be from <form> submissions, manually entered URIs, or even old links pointing to search results. It uses WordPress 2.2′s built-in internal permalink interpreter.

Advanced Permalinks – Provides advanced permalink options that allow you to have multiple permalink structures and 301 redirect old permalink structures (many structures are allowed). No longer supported but still works!

Get the cissp tutorial and 70-653 dumps to practice and pass 98-361 test on first try.

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The SEO building blocks consist of five key things to do.

There are obviously many things that you can do to for search engine optimization (SEO) but which should you focus on? Your time is valuable so I made a list of the top 5 things that you should do to maximize your time. In other words, why spend four hours on something when you can spend an hour on a task that should return 100x more value? Enough chatter, let’s get on the list:

1. Write fresh content consistently! I’ve mentioned this in several previous posts, most recently at Blog about your niche. There is absolutely nothing more important than providing real value on your blog on a regular basis. So write, write, write. Set a goal of every other day or every weekday or every day. Just make sure you post useful information related to the theme of your blog a few times a week at a minimum. If your blog is about puppies, keep writing about puppies and skip the rant on politics.

 

2. Make your titles relevant. Having good, catchy titles are great. Having good, catchy titles with keywords related to your post is even better. So if your post is about losing weight, instead of “Shedding your unwanted fat” you could go with “Shedding the extra weight: lose 10 pounds in a month safely”.

 

3. Use keywords in your content. Don’t go crazy with this and scatter keywords unnecessarily (you will actually be penalized for that) but make sure you have some keywords in the body of your post. Imagine if I never actually wrote the words “search engine optimization” in this post, which is exactly what the post is about.

 

4. Have a logical site structure. This is pretty automatic if you use a good blogging platform (e.g. blogger or wordpress.com). However, if you are using custom themes or running your own blog on a separate host, that may change things a bit. Just make sure that your blog structure is organized so your directories and pages are easy to understand.

 

5. Use Google Analytics. It’s arguably the most useful analytical tool for your blog and it’s absolutely free! There’s no reason not to use Google Analytics. You can learn about where your visitors are from geographically, how long they are staying, what your traffic is this week compared to last week, how many other posts they are looking at, and much more. One important thing to monitor is which keywords are bringing them to your site. You could simply continue to utilize those keywords in future posts if you want to improve ranking for that niche.

 

None of this is groundbreaking. In fact, you should probably do these things for your readers anyway, not just for SEO purposes. And even though search engine algorithms change all the time, the aforementioned things to do have pretty much always been part of the core. It doesn’t mean you don’t need to do anything else either but if you only have time for 5 things, do these. Backlinks, keywords in the URL, tags/categories, directories, social networking, microblogging, and a bunch of other tactics will come in due time. Happy blogging!

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After spending weeks thinking about it, you think you have the perfect domain name for your blog. You finally get the nerve to spend the $10 or so to buy it but it’s not available. You knew there was a chance of that happening so you reach for your backup domain name and that’s gone too. So is your third choice. You end up buying one that you don’t love but you tell yourself that it’s good enough. But is it?

Look, we’ve all been there. As much as we’d all like to think that we’re unique and have a unique idea, the reality is that it has likely already been done many times over. We still have to make do with what’s available though. Here are some tips to making the most out of your domain name.

• Use keywords in it. There are exceptions, like johnchow.com, but for many of us, having a domain name without keywords hurts, especially in the early going. I know you might be building a brand and that’s perfectly fine. As long as you weigh the pros and cons, and you know that one con is a slightly uphill battle when making a name for yourself (or blog). For example, do a Google search on free blog help and you’ll see that this site comes up pretty quick. It took only a few days for that to happen!

• Stick with a .com name. Unless you’re not planning on making any money because you’re working for a non-profit, in which case I would recommend a .net or .org, your domain name should end with .com. You will lose too many people because they won’t remember that your site is .biz instead of .com.

• Keep it short. I know, almost everything is gone! Over 90% of any combination of any two words with less than five letters are gone! Even made up words are gone! Still, don’t be tempted to use a long phrase unless you have to. Get creative if you must. Instead of projectmanagementtestcenter.com, go with pmtestcenter.com, which is easier on the tongue and the fingers.

• Don’t use numbers, hyphens or strange spellings. There are countless sites with success using these, such as suite101.com, but generally speaking, if you have to explain that learn2blogtoday.com has a number 2 in it or mygoodfriendz.com has a z in it, then you’ve already dug yourself a hole.

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So you finally created your blog and spent hours setting it up and adding content. How can you tell how well you’re doing compared to the rest of the web? There are a handful of ways that are industry accepted, one of them being Alexa. If you haven’t met her yet, oh you will; what a love affair you must have with her.

Alexa markets herself as a web information company and provides “Free web traffic, metrics, top sites lists, site demographics, hot urls, and more…” but why do you need to care about all that? You might not need all that just yet. But even if you don’t use any of Alexa’s free offerings, you want to, at a minimum, know your rank. Just go to Alexa and type in your URL. You’ll get a results page and without going into great detail, you’ll want to look at your Alexa Traffic Rank, which I’m sure will be in the high millions if you show up at all, depending on how new your blog is.

One way to look at it is that the internet is popularity contest. If your Alexa Traffic Rank is 20,000,000, that means you are the 20 millionth most popular website on the planet! Alexa basically combines your average daily visitors and your average pageviews over the last three months. The website with the highest score will be have Alexa Rank: 1, which is currently held by Google  (2 is Facebook and 3 is Yahoo, if you’re curious).

Whenever I tell people about Alexa, they immediately start entering every website they can think of off the top of their heads just to see Alexa Ranks. To save yourself the trouble, just add an Alexa add-on for Firefox so you’ll see Alexa Rankings and much more right on your status bar. So while you’re web surfing, all you have to do is look down and see the Alexa Rank for that particular website.

There are other ways to measure the relevance of your blog but what Alexa gives you is a good gauge of where you stand. It’s fun watching your blog move up the rankings and hopefully, Alexa will be a motivator for you to chip away at improving it.

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