Are you SEOing your blog?

I don’t know about you, but lately it seems that I’ve been getting tonnes of spam mail from concerned individuals that my site is not search engine optimized.

Well, perhaps it’s not. And that’s ok. {Shocking eh!}

SEO (search engine optimization) has been the buzz-word for internet marketers, and if your website wasn’t SEO then you weren’t making money.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we do need to be found in the search engines, however, spending a bazillion dollars of your marketing budget on SEO may line their pockets full of your dough instead of YOUR pockets.

Even Google suggests that you should…

[Quoted from the Google Webmaster Guidelines]

I currently consider myself in the Little Britches Rodeo of SEO, I am learning my way by watching others, listening to what experts are saying used to work and what they are now saying not to do anymore. Based on that info, I thought I would share some basic tips to help you make sure that your site is Human Optimized and can then also be found in the search engines.

My domain, cowgirlupwebdesign.com has the keyword “webdesign” in it.

But don’t make it all about the keyword. Web Design is not the only keyword I could have used. I also work with Thesis and WordPress and specifically I custom code sites.

I could have ended up with a domain something like: customthesiswordpresswebdesign.com but that would have been crazy – don’t ya think?!

Do you even know what Meta Description is? Well, that’s probably why they used to be written all technical and for the search engines. Just remove the name Meta from that and think of a Description. What would you say to someone – in 20 words or less – about what it is that you do?

This is something that you can do yourself, or have your assistant do. You don’t need to hire out a super specialist and blow gobs of money. But it does take some work and some thinking.

But don’t go with the old adage “If something is good, more must be better.” Don’t over use keywords.

Thanks to WordPress, keywords are easy to add to each and every blog post. You should notice that there is a box in the right hand column called Tags. And in that box is an area where you can write a keyword and/or 2-3 word phrase. You can add several keywords if they are appropriate.

But again, don’t go super crazy. Depending on your blog post style, these keywords will show up at the bottom of the post….see below for the tags that I’ve used for this post.

My goal in writing this article today has been to help YOU. Getting found on the internet is definitely important, that’s how you found me. But if I wrote stuff only to be found by search engines, I’m not really helping them any, they don’t care what I have to say, but you do. And if I can help you be more efficient with your time and your money, then this was a good article.

There are services out there that can do this automatically for you, and I’m all about having good systems in place to make things easier, but sometimes, the personal touch will be worth the effort. Use the technology to help you connect to the various social networking services, but I would suggest not relying fully on technology to handle all of these tasks for you. Sometimes technology flops (unfortunately). And this is also your opportunity to customize your posts to be more – dare I say – human!