SEO – Do what is effective

I have spent the better part of the past six months trying to optimize my blogs, I haven’t always been effective, but I would like to share with you some of what I have learned over the past six months.  My biggest gains in SEO have been in determining my key words, and trying to capitalize upon my keywords.  Improving the quality of posts, I now try to write longer posts, and make sure I use my keywords within the posts.  I have stopped checking out how my competition is ranking on various key words.

So you can determine what keywords you use, look within your google analytics, what words are driving traffic towards your site.  Look at those words carefully, do they match how you have your site designed?  Are your major keywords categories?  They should be categories, because this is how organic traffic is arriving at your site.  Use this as your first guide, consider writing more content within the keywords that your audience is naturally attracted to you. This will bring you more traffic, and hopefully make your traffic more sticky.

I have worked very hard in lengthening my posts.  I am horrible about writing short posts.  I have written hundreds of posts that are sadly less than 250 words.  You really need to write longer posts, the longer posts will increase your chances of pulling people into your site through search engines, because we use a variety of words.  I also think people like to read content that isn’t written like a robot.  When people enjoy writing about something they naturally write a great deal about a particular subject.

Finally, I have stopped watching the rankings of my competition.  I used to spend a great deal of time watching my competition and seeing where they were ranking.  This was in ineffective use of my time.  What I should have been doing, was looking at their methodology if they had one, are they using more photos, are they annotating their photos, how long are their posts.  This was honestly a sinkhole of my time.  I had gradually moved away from it once I started to work on my own content, and guess what, the traffic came.

Perhaps in this next year, or the next few months, take a look at the keywords, look at how your audience is coming to your site, and go with that.  You already do well there, small changes there will bring you more traffic.  Improve the quality of your posts, write about what you audience wants, and what you enjoy.  Make sure your posts are at least 300 words, add photos, make them interesting.  Finally stop watching everyone else so much, that you fail to spend quality time on your blog.   If you improve upon what you already do well, you will see the traffic follow.