First Comment

I got my first comment on the blog today and this means that this blog is getting more exposure. Now, there is no way I can back off from this challenge.

I’m so happy that I will reveal more nuggets of information about search engine marketing. Remember I talked about the power of backward links, meaning other sites linking to your site? This is not the complete story yet, there are still a few things to cover.

Firstly, search engine optimization falls into two categories, on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization basically refers to your title tags, keyword density, header tags and so on. I’m not a big fan of on-page optimization, since I totally believe in building sites for your visitors.

Search engines are in the business of providing search results that their visitors want, so if you are not designing with the end user in mind, chances are the search engines will come up with new algorithmns to wipe you off their search results. Also, not designing your pages for users will also affect the likelihood of other webmasters linking to your site, therefore it harms your off-page optimization.

For on-page optimization, I just work on the title tags, meta keywords and meta descriptions (meta tags carry very little weight, if any, nowadays). Off-page optimization basically means getting people to link to your site, but that’s not good enough. You need to get related sites to link to you using related text for you to rank well.

So for example, you manage to get tons of people to link to your ‘Fishing’ blog and they chose to link to you with the text ‘Fishing Blog’, you will rank better for the phrase ‘Fishing Blog’ than if they had linked to you with text like ‘Just Another Blog’

With that said, it’s now important to plan the keywords which you want to rank well for, since it’s not realistic to rank at the top for all keywords. Then you incorporate them into your title and try to get other webmasters to link to you with the same text you came up with. To keep things simpler, you might want to come up with a ‘Link To Us’ page. This brings upon added convenience for webmasters wanting to link to you and chances are that they will use the exact text you specified.

I know this is basic stuff, but this basic stuff works. Oh yes, remember to give Google some time to index your site and track your backlinks, typically a month or so.