The next step, though, is to start ranking well for terms that you already rank for somewhere in the results. Pages in the top 3 results can get ten times as much traffic (or more) than pages that appear on page 2 or later, so we want to move those low-ranking pages up as high as we can.

I’ll give you an example. I noticed a few weeks ago that Google had Kim ranked at #15 for ER Nurse. So, I changed her homepage <title> from just “Emergiblog” to “Emergiblog // The Life & Times of an ER Nurse.” (That was already her tagline, but we just added it to the <title> to get “ER Nurse” into it.) Within just 3 or 4 days, she had moved to #11. It really was just as easy as that.

I definitely don’t want to stop there in trying to move her up, but I just wanted to make a simple, easy change to show how much you could affect the results with very little effort. I’ll cover later what else we want to do to move her up even higher, but before I do that let’s step through the process from the beginning.

Pick Your Target Phrases

For this particular technique, we’re attempting to rank well for phrases we already rank for somewhere. So how do you find out what you’re already ranking for?

The stats program you run on your blog will tell you where your traffic is coming from. Many will even give you a report specifically listing the keywords that visitors used to find your site without you having to sift through all the referrers. There’s also a new company on the block called HitTail that does nothing but tell you what keywords are sending you traffic.

So get your list of keywords and sort them by how many visitors have found your site using them. Then start with the most popular one and see where you rank. If you rank lower than 10th (i.e. 11, 12, 13, etc.), make a note of exactly which page is ranking (it likely won’t be your homepage) and move on to the next step.

Tweaking the Page to Rank Better

Once you find a page that is ranking for a term but could be ranking better, it’s time to tweak the page to help it move up in the rankings. There are three ways to do that.

Get the Phrase into the <title>

The <title> tag is the single most important element on the entire page, so adding your phrase there somewhere will almost always improve its ranking noticeably. The great thing is, it’s easy to do that in most cases. The <title> is just the title of your post, so all you have to do is tweak the title to include your phrase. (If it’s the homepage you’re looking to change, you’ll actually have to modify your template to do that in most cases.)

Get the Phrase into the Page More Times

In addition to getting the phrases into the <title>, you also want to make sure you use it as often as you can in the page itself without being unnatural. I can’t stress that last part enough. Your blog is for readers, not search engines. We’re making tweaks to help our rankings, not reformatting our blogs. Don’t go overboard here, or you risk turning off your readers.

My post about tattooed women is an extreme example of using your target phrase multiple times, and is a great example of going overboard. It definitely ranks well, but it’s extraordinarily awkward to read. That’s not a good trade-off.

Notice in that post, too, that I used the phrase both in italics and in bold text various places. It’s possible that emphasizing the phrase that way gives it a little extra weight. If it does, it’s not much, but it doesn’t hurt to try if you can work it in.

Link Smart

Finally, look for opportunities to link to the page using the phrase you’re trying to improve rankings for. For example, I’ve noticed that my “Best Free WordPress Themes” post actually ranks pretty well for best wordpress themes but could be ranking much better. Because of that, whenever I find myself naturally linking to that page, I try to link to it as best WordPress themes. Google, especially, puts a lot of weight on what words were used to link to the page, so this is another great way to nudge those rankings up.

Why Start with These Phrases?

You want to start with the phrases that are already sending you traffic because that tells you for sure that these are valuable phrases. You could rank #1 for delayed beautiful thing, but nobody’s searching for that. And if nobody’s searching, nobody’s finding.

If you can spend a few minutes making changes to rank better for phrases that are already sending you traffic, though, you could easily see your search engine traffic double in just a week.

Questions? Confusion? Post your questions below! Also, I’d love to track your success with you. If you try this out and want to let me know how it works for you, I think it would be great for people to see some more real-life examples. Send them to me, and I’ll use them in a future post!

Just take a look at the top ten search engine ranking factors and notice how many are naturally inherent in blogs. I count seven to nine, depending on how strict you want to be. Since blogs are almost always text-heavy, very community-driven and interlinked heavily, it’s hard to find your blog not ranking for lots of things if it becomes popular.

However, there are a few easy things that you do need to do to ensure that you’re set up for search engine success. The basic principle behind all of them is that SEO, first and foremost, is about so much more than your homepage. Especially with blogs, you’ll find that most of your search engine visitors come in on anything but your homepage. So almost all the basic SEO for a blog has to do with your individual pages.

Change Two Settings

First things first, there are two basic settings that it would be helpful to tweak in your blog setup.

Move Your Post Title to the Front of Your <title> Tag

Keywords in the <title> tag are the number one search engine ranking factor. Because of that, you want the title of your post to be the first thing in your <title> because it gets your best keywords as close to the front as possible.

Many blogs have <title>s that look something like this:

My Blog Name » My Post Category » My Post Title

You’re better off in most cases, though, having it look like this:

My Post Title » My Blog Name

Notice that I took out the Post Category, too. That’s because for most of us, for a variety of reasons, the category doesn’t actually add any value to the <title>. By leaving it out, you take out words that would otherwise be watering down the keywords in the title of your post.

(You’ll need to change your blog’s template or theme directly to make this change, and that varies from platform to platform. Just let me know if you need any help. On some, like Blogger, you actually won’t be able to change this at all.)

Use Meaningful URLs

The importance of keywords in the URL is hotly disputed, but with blogs there’s no reason not to have them. In fact, blogging platforms like Blogger do that by default. Take a look at this URL for example and notice how the title of the post is mirrored in the URL:

http://nurse-ratcheds.blogspot.com/what-does-it-take-to-be-real-nurse.html

If you use WordPress, you’ll need to go into Options > Permalinks and specify that you want to use better URLs. You can use the “Date and name based” option, but I hate to have the day of the month in my URL. So I always select “Custom” and use some variation on this format: /%category%/%postname%.htm

Whether you want the date in the URL depends largely on how time-sensitive your writing is. On this site, for instance, I don’t think it matters as much so I don’t use it. Other places I do. The only real keys are to get the “postname” variable in there and use as few elements as possible.

Warning: I probably wouldn’t do this on a blog that’s more than a few months old since you’ll be changing the URLs for all your posts, not just your new ones. Search engines will have to re-index those URLs, and you’ll lose all the link value that you had built up. You have to weigh the pros and cons, though. It might be worth taking a step or two back now to take several steps forward down the road. (If you’re unsure whether to do it or not, just ask me and I’ll be happy to take a look.)

Be Involved

Links to your site are the #2 and #3 most important ranking factors, so it’s important to get out and meet your neighbors and do many of the other free and easy things that increase traffic because all those things lead to people linking to your blog. When people link to you, it not only brings you traffic directly (from people clicking the links) but also indirectly (from boosting your search engine rankings). That combination is hard to beat.

Blog Differently

I’ve filed these next steps under Blog Differently, but you may already be doing at least one of them.

Link, Link, Link

In “(Link) Love Makes the World Go Round“, I talked about all the ways you can spread the link love. What I didn’t tell you, though, were all the benefits of free (link) love. One of those is better search engine rankings.

The more you link out to other good sites, the more search engines begin to see you as a valuable resource. It will take quite some time to be seen as an “authority site,” and most of us probably won’t actually achieve that mythical status, but the more you link out to good sites, the more your authority grows.

Don’t restrict your links to only “good” sites, though. You don’t want to be a link nazi. Avoid linking to “bad neighborhoods,” but never withhold a link just because you think the site wasn’t “good.” If there was an opportunity for you to link to it, chances are it had done something to earn that link. Remember that at some point, your site wasn’t very “good” either.

And just as importantly, be sure to link to your own site. Anytime you reference something that you’ve written, be sure to link to it. Linking well within your own site is the #4 top ranking factor, and it’s usually the one that you have the most control over — a great combination.

Pick Good Titles

As I noted before, keywords in the <title> tag are the number one search engine ranking factor. Because of that, you may want to choose titles with search engines in mind. Think about what people might search for that your post matches and then try to use those keywords in the title of your post. I say “may want to” because by all means, SEO shouldn’t drive everything you do. If you have the option between two equally good titles, though, pick the one that has better keywords in it. (See “Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, or The Power of Titles” for more on titles.)

Don’t Overdo It

These five basic steps will put you in great position to start getting more and more free visitors from search engines. If you do nothing but these five things, you’ll wind up being very surprised at just how many people find you through search engines (and you’ll be really surprised at what they searched for to get there, as noted in the “Tattooed Women” post mentioned above).

Above all else, though, be careful about getting too focused on SEO. Search engine traffic is great, but for the vast majority of blogs, you want to focus on other ways to generate traffic. If you get too focused on SEO, you lose your focus on your readers and aren’t they the whole reason we’re blogging in the first place? Gimmicks like John Chow’s would totally turn readers off on most blogs, though it fits perfectly with his.

In the coming months, I’ll be covering more and more advanced strategies to improving your search engine rankings because, while I have a lot of experience with blogging, I have even more with SEO. I’ve been doing SEO for seven years now, and I’ve grown lots of sites many times over with just good, basic SEO — including one site to $1M in sales in just a year. The results of those efforts actually support me 100% now, freeing me up to do fun things like this. Blogs and SEO go together like peanut butter and chocolate, so there will be thousands of things we can talk about.

In order to make things as clean and simple as possible, there are so many things that I didn’t include in this post. So if you have questions or comments, please leave them below. It will help me see if something wasn’t very clear — which is likely — and help everyone else along the way!

Take Advantage of Your Network

If you’ve been actively getting out and meeting your neighbors, you’ve built up a pretty good network of blogging and website-owning friends. Drop them an email to let them know about your new blog and ask them if they’ll let their readers know about it, too. (And don’t forget to give it a little link love on any sites that you control, too!)

Guest Blog

If you’re an active blog reader (and if you’re a blog writer, you ought to also be a blog reader), you’ve probably seen guest bloggers on several of the blogs that you read. Well, scoring just one post on a popular blog can give your own blog a great jumpstart. It’s one of the best ways to get visitors to your blog. Check out Darren’s post on Why Guest Bloggers are Great for a Blog for more info and links to his full series on guest blogging, and check out Blogger LinkUp for opportunities.

Comment on Other Blogs

Commenting on other blogs is a great way to get noticed, both by the blogger and by people reading the comments. You’ll get a special benefit from those who maintain a Top Commentators list, too. Make sure your comments add value to the discussion, though. Nobody likes to wade through a lot of “That’s right!” or “I agree” comments. (The strategy could backfire in a huge way if you try to get visitors to your blog by spamming other blogs.)

Also, the sooner you comment on a post that later becomes very popular, the more visibility (and clickthroughs) you’ll end up getting. You’ll probably develop an eye pretty quickly for which posts are going to end up being really popular.

Give out the Link Love

In every post you write, be sure to give out as much link love as possible. Most avid bloggers watch their sites like a hawk and will notice right away if someone has linked to them, quite often leading to a beautiful friendship. Create posts specifically to review, expound, critique or disagree with things other bloggers have written (always respectfully so), and be aware of other opportunities to link out in every post you write. Don’t get so hung up on getting visitors to your blog that you try to get them from going anywhere else once they find you.

Promote Your Blog’s URL

Keep an eye out for different ways to make people aware of your blog’s URL. The most obvious way is to be active in forums and include your blog in your signature, but you can also include it on letterhead, in your email signature, and lots of other places. Be creative.

Blog Carnivals

Blog carnivals are great for driving traffic to your blog. Participants in each Change of Shift, for example, all see a significant burst of traffic to their blogs in the days after each edition. Check out Blog Carnival for a huge list of carnivals on all sorts of topics.

And to really give your traffic a boost, actually host a blog carnival. A word of warning, though: for some carnivals, hosting can be a ton of work. Make sure you don’t take on more than you can handle. Talk to some of the previous hosts to get an idea of how much time it took them, and make sure you participate several times to get a feel for the carnival itself.

Blog Live

If you have an opportunity to go to an interesting conference or other gathering that others can’t get to, blog live from there and include plenty of pictures. If you’re one of the few doing, it or if you do a particularly good job, you’ll find lots of bloggers recommending that their readers check out your coverage.

Don’t Ignore Search Engine Optimization

Making sure your blog is optimized for search engines is a very smart thing to do. It may not make much difference in the short-term, but it will pay huge dividends the larger and older your blog gets. Look for a dedicated post about this soon.

In the meantime, though, you want to be intentional about your SEO without overdoing it. Gimmicks like John Chow’s would totally turn readers off on most blogs (but it fits his perfectly).

Interview a Popular Blogger

As I wrote in Can I Interview You for My Blog?, approaching someone for an interview is a great way to get your site noticed. Interview a popular blogger in your niche or, maybe better yet, interview a not-yet-popular blogger who should be. You can always say you gave them their big break

Create a Theme

The majority of bloggers don’t design the themes for their blog. Thus, the demand for themes is very high. If you can create a good theme that other bloggers start to use, you’ll start to see the links to your site really start to pile up. (And, granted, this one may not qualify as “easy” for most of us.)

Join a Blog Network

A blog network is simply a collection of blogs that help drive traffic to one another. Large, established networks might not let new blogs in, but many do hold open application periods every so often. You can also approach networks that look like a good fit for your blog or even start your own — getting visitors to your blog and helping others to do the same!

Most Importantly…

All of these tips assume that you’ve already got great content — which is easily the number one way to get visitors to your blog. If you don’t have great content, you’re just wasting your time. The visitors will leave just as quickly as the came, and you’ve quite likely lost a chance to get them back. If you do have great content, though, you may not have to do anything else. People will talk and link and promote you themselves without you having to lift a finger. It’s not quite “If you build it, they will come,” but it’s close.

So focus first on posting stuff worth reading before you start trying to get people to read it. You won’t be disappointed!

(Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan is one of the finalists for oddest book title of the year, not surprisingly.)

So what is the world does this have to do with blogging?

Glad you asked.

We all know (don’t we?) that Google and other search engines can bring traffic to our blogs. However, most people don’t realize that having good titles is more than half the battle, as Beth so eloquently stated yesterday. I encourage you to read her post for some great examples, and to read Kim’s as well where she blogs about ranking well for Dorothy Hamill.

What this means is that not only do you need to use good, keyword-rich titles, you also need to be conscious about blogging on topics that people are searching for if you want to actively attract people to your blog. (See my Paris Hilton example.) Use the keywords as close to the front of the title of your post as you can and use them several times within the post itself.

As Rand writes today, “Strength of the domain, Internal and external links to the page, and Keyword in the title tag” are “80-90%” of search engine optimization for your site. It really is that easy, and you’ve got pretty good control over most of those things.

So before you post that next post, think about how you might be able to tweak it to use words that more people are searching for. You may not find yourself ranking well today, but down the road you’ll find that you’ve built up a lot of equity that really starts to pay off.

In fact, if you’re already seeing some search engine traffic, you may want to go back and tweak old posts that might could be ranking several places better if you just changed the Title a little bit. Take a look at your traffic stats and see what keywords are sending you some traffic. Then see if you can change those posts to start getting a lot more.

(And yes, I hope to find myself ranking well for Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan very soon )