So you’ve found or created your niche and now you want to stir up some traffic . What’s the next step? Well aside from writing relevant, unique content there’s a list of rules you should be following. The search engines are looking for specific criteria that I’ll explain below. See what the bots are seeing with using the links browser here. Run this after applying the following information to see why this effective.
What are the Spiders Looking For?
1. Tags …specifically titles, alts and meta information. Spend some time thinking about your post title. Does it include the keyword you are writing about? If not it either should, or it should at least be provocative enough that someone would want to click on it. After your url this is the most specific keyword and will get the most exposure so choose it wisely. Also don’t forget your, “alt” and, “title” tags in your images. Make sure you include your keyword, but don’t overdue it as it may be considered keyword stuffing and that does you more harm than good.
2. Secondly are the heading tags; those being H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. After the title of your page these are the next most important tags. Again having your keyword in these tags or keyword phrases included here will help to make your page more relevant.
3. A good meta description doesn’t carry the weight it once did, but it is important as this is the short synopsis a viewer will be reading that will in turn lead them to your website. Popular blogging platforms such as what I’m using on NateBal.com; WordPress, have plugins built that will help you do this. Read more about the All in One SEO Pack here.
4. Keyword density is also important. This is the number of times the keyword or phrase you are writing about appears in your post. It’s a good idea to keep it at about 15% though that is not a hard or fast rule. As long as the content you are writing about is relevant and unique you should be good.
How to get Yahoo Traffic With Flickr Hosted Images
Flickr which is owned by Yahoo places a higher importance on images hosted here with their defined image search. This is nice 2-fold because you can add multiple tags to your photos once images are uploaded here. By adding tags your essentially adding multiple keywords which come up in searches on Yahoo. These images can be made further relevant by adding your photos into defined sets.
Here’s an article I wrote for JasonMarshall.net that gives you step by step directions on how to Increase Your Yahoo Traffic With Flickr Images.
You Must Submit
Submitting to the social networks is a must. My site is set up to hit a number of social networks every time I publish a post. Click here to learn how to do this automatically every time you publish to your blog. Syndicate Your RSS Feed to Your Favorite Social Networks.
With that said there are some top sites that as a blogger you should be submitting to. This isn’t a definitive list, nor is it all the social networks I submit to, but these are a good hard and fast core you should include with your SEO efforts.
How Do I Know When I Am Effective?
Analytics is what you need or more to the point Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free and easy to implement. If you have a Gmail address you can get started right now. Once you have a Analytics account you will be given a small strip of code to add to the header of your page. Once this is installed Google will start tracking information and have data for you with in 24 hours. I use Google Analytics in conjunction with AwStats for detailed reporting.
Due Diligence
This is just a blueprint of some good blogging practices. What works on my site wont necessarily work on yours. So know your niche and write specifically about it. Make sure you have good relevant original content and write often. The more content that’s out there the better chance you will have that someone will find you in cyberspace.
Happy Blogging 
Incoming search terms for the article:
- effective blog tagging
- effective blog tags
- effective blogs images
- how to create effective blog post
- how to make effective tags
About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here. 
Nate Balcom on 
Comments Are Closed
Comments have been disabled for this post. Sorry!