Search Engine Optimisations (SEO) for Your Blog

How to (& how not to) Optimise Your Blog for Search Engines

This article is about improving your blog's 'searchability' (if that's a word) by a search engine, giving it a better chance to be ranked higher on the search engine's results page (SERP). However we want to improve our blog's searchability in a search engine-friendly way so that our blog won't be blacklisted from a SERP. To do so, we want to employ the White Hat SEO techniques ONLY and not the Black Hat SEO techniques.
To learn more about White Hat SEO techniques visit Blog-Maniac here and for more about Black SEO techniques jump onto ABCSEO's website here.

But just quick run-down on what white hat and black hat SEO techniques are...if you want to run a quality blog and stay on Google's good-side, you'll want to avoid black hat and keep to the white hat techniques.

Why? Well, White Hat techniques are seen as the right way of employing techniques onto a blog or website in order to be ranked higher on a search engine's results page and...

...Black Hat techniques on the other hand are seen as the wrong way of employing techniques onto a blog or website in order to be ranked higher on a search engine's results page. So if you employ black hat SEO techniques, there's good chance you might get blacklisted from ever showing up on a SERP. Now on to the important stuff.


Best SEO Techniques to Use to Enhance Your Blog
1. Keyword Effectiveness: Ever heard of the acronym K.I.S.S; Keep It Simple Stupid. This acronym, for this article applies to your headings & titles. When a user types in a keyword or keywords in a search engine, they would more likely use simple terms. So making sure your titles and the content within your articles are simple (no advanced, over the top synonyms), will give your blog a better chance to be pulled up on a search engine's list of results or SERP (PushOn, 2011). 


2. Quality Inbound Links: Besides a search engine, the second best way to receive potential users is to have links coming in from other sites or referring sites to yours (SEOMethod, 2011). By increasing the amount of sites that refer to yours, search engines like Google would place more emphasis on blogs that contain more inbound links thus increasing your rank on a SERP. 

The more inbound links you have the better. Google uses this  info to sort its Pagerank results (Su, 2011, slide 36). 

3. SEO Tools or Software: There are so many SEO-based tools & software out (some free) that you can use to your blog's benefit. For a more comprehensive list of SEO tools see SEOBook, a website which has compiled a list of great SEO tools & software. Two of my favourite SEO tools to use are listed below.

• SEOMoz's Ranking Checker: This tool is allows you to view the most typed-in keyword (up to 5 keywords) in your embedded search function. Using this sort of information, you can then re-arrange the content on your blog to suit the level of punctuation your users are using to find content on your blog, plus many other reasons (SEOmoz, 2011).

• WeBuildPages' Strongest Subpages: This tools allows you view those pages which viewed more frequently or have more activity than others. You can do the same thing for your competitors' blogs (WeBuildPages, 2011).

Reference List (for further reading, you can follow up on the links below):

1. Google. (2011). Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Retrieved August 24th, 2011 from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

2. Internet Empire. (2011). SEO - The Difference Between White Hat & Black SEO. Retrieved August 24th, 2011 from http://www.internet-empire.com/seo-the-difference-between-black-hat-and-white-hat-seo.htm

3. PushOn. (2011). Top 5 White Hat SEO Techniques. Retrieved August 25th, 2011 from http://www.pushon.co.uk/articles/top-5-white-hat-and-black-hat-search-optimisation-techniques/ 


4. SEOMethod. (2011). The SEO Method. Retrieved August 25th, 2011 from http://www.theseomethod.com/


5. SEOmoz. (2011). Rank Tracker. Retrieved August 25th 2011, from http://www.seomoz.org/rank-tracker.


6. WeBuildPages. (2011). Strongest SubPages Tool. Retrieved August 25th 2011 from http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/strongest-subpages-tool.php.


7. Su,Veronica. (2011). 3623ICT Information and Content Management: Week 05. Retrieved from Griffith University, School of Information Communication Technology, Learning@Griffith Website: https://learning.secure.griffith.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_100323_1&frame=top. 

What Search Tool to Embed in Your Blog; Swicki or Google?

When embedding a search tool into a blogging site, you need to step back and analyse your user’s needs for what they may want to search for and retrieve from your blog. Answer, use a customisable or specialised search tool; either Swicki or Google.

After researching for some of the best search tools to embed into a blog, I finalised the list of search tools down to Swicki and Google mainly because both can be specialised towards blogs and function in a way that could optimise a user’s searching experience.  The next section will talk about each of the search tools and their advantages & disadvantages.

Eurekster's Swicki – Its Drawcard

• The Swicki platform harnesses the knowledge & behaviour of online communities to increase search relevance & value for site visitors i.e. social search engines (Leaman, 2009).
• Swicki allows for a deep customisation of the design, the search behaviour of the search tool & folksonomic indicators or tags (Leaman, 2009).

Google's Custom Search  - Its Drawcard

• According to Google, custom search “…enables you to create a search engine for your website, your blog, or a collection of websites. You can fine-tune the ranking, customize the look and feel of the search results, and invite your friends or trusted users to help you build your custom search engine. You can even make money from your search engine by using your Google AdSense account” (Google, 2011).

Similarities Between Google & Swicki

• Both Google and Swicki allow users to produce customised search engines.
• The final result, where both search tool are able to sort the results by topic are similar.
• Both support keyword searching.

Differences Between Google & Swicki

• Swicki lets you create a tag cloud of search terms.
• Swicki’s search results are more topic focused i.e. the search zone is much more narrower than Google's.
• Furthermore, because of Swicki’s narrower search zone, results come ‘recall-based’ where all information is returned regarding a certain keyword whereas in Google, results are returned based on relevance or ‘precision-based’.
• Google contains a nifty feature of word suggestions in a form of a word wheel (see image 1 below).

Image 1: A list of word suggestions would come-up after typing a few letters.

• Swicki’s order of search results are directly influenced by social preference whereas Google’s order of its’ search results are based on popularity i.e. number of clicks a website receives.
• Google allows you to exclude sites you don’t want in the search results.
• Google has a proven search system in place with more to access than Swicki.
• Because Swicki have been in the business of customised search engines longer, it’s rightly assumed that they have a better insight and experience into the whole ‘customised-search-engine’ market niche (if there is such a niche).
• Swicki allows users to vote on the usefulness of a website for rapid ranking changes whereas Google does this but based on a per-click status.
• Google supports more query languages for use when searching whereas Swicki supports some & the others, not so much or not at all.
• Google’s ‘natural language search’ capabilities are far more advanced & proven than Swicki’s ability or lack thereof.
• Swicki’s logical connectors within its’ keyword searches are not developed as it is in Google’s custom search.
• Swicki notifies when you’ve had a click activity, finding what others think are interesting, to improve the search optimisation.

The Verdict

The question of which search tool to use really comes down to user preference. My preferences however are based on this blog which I believe is assorted by topic i.e. the questions each week I have to answer for my university course are topic based. Therefore Swicki, which allows me to customise searches by topic and has a stronger emphases on topic categorisation, would be my choice.

Reference List:


1. Leaman, R. (2009, February 10). Top 6 Popular Site Search Widgets [Web Log Post]. Retrieved from http://www.wildapricot.com/blogs/newsblog/archive/2009/02/10/top-6-popular-site-search-widgets.aspx.

2. Google. (2011). Google Custom Search. Retrieved August 16th, 2011 from http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/customsearch/docs/start.html. 

For further reading on either Swicki, Google’s custom search or search tools check out  the websites or blogs below:

Znitchit's Utimate Search 2.0 Showdown: Want to compare the major search tools? This blog shows a chart & a simple video, displaying where some of the major search tools compare against each other.


Blakeman's Search Tool Comparison: This another search tool comparison but in an easy to read, table form.

Google's Custom Search vs. Wordpress's Search Tool: Once again, another search tool comparison but between Google's Custom Search & Wordpress's version...just in case you want to use Wordpress to create your blogs.