I have never claimed to know a lot about search engine optimization, but as of lately I have been getting a lot of traffic from search engines. I started to increase search engine hits since I went through and retitled my blog posts, changed keywords, reformatted content, internal linking, and make the URLs search engine friendly. Most of all, I used the Google keyword tool to decide what keywords I would try to be hitting. I have now increased my search engine hits by 300%. Considering that I only ones getting 100 unique visitors a day, this isn’t that huge. However, increasing my search engine hits is good for me as that is one of my worst weaknesses.

I’m going to show you exactly what I did to increase search engine hits. I’m sure there will be many people that disagree with me, but I know that these things have actually worked for me. Whether you want to believe it or not, these do increase your search engine hits. (I have really hit the keyword “increase search engine hits” in the first two paragraphs. Google will just love me now.)

Increase Search Engine Hits

Google Keyword Tool – I am in love with the Google keyword tool and so should you. When you are thinking about a post your writing make sure to hit a couple main keywords. When you’re a new blog is better to try to hit keywords that are less competitive. So what you want to do when you come to the Google keyword web page is enter in keyword ideas you have for your post. Then when you submit those keywords it will show you the following information about those keywords and other relevant ones: how competitive each keyword is, how much traffic it is predicted to receive this month, and how much traffic it received last month. You can get other information about the keywords but I tend to not look at that when I’m thinking about increasing search engine hits. Usually if it has no competition, a thousand or more searches, and it can be used as one of your main keywords, I will build my blog post content around that word or phrase. (I will try refer back to the Google keyword tool as much as possible throughout this post)

Retitle Post Titles – your blog headlines are one of the most important things when it comes to getting search engine hits. When you used the Google keyword tool to find a word or phrase you will build your blog post content around then you should realize you’ll have to use it in your post title. For example, when I decided to use the phrase “All Twitter”, it also became a post title. You don’t have to use your phrase or word you are targeting by itself. You can surround the phrase or word you are targeting with other words. Just try to use your keyword in your post title somewhere.

Keywords – I have received a lot of e-mails about keywords for some reason. I talked about the Google keyword tool above so this part shouldn’t be too difficult unless you didn’t use the keyword tool. Make sure that your keywords are relevant to the words that are part of your content. If you put keywords down that are not relevant then you will be punished by Google. I went back through and wrote two to four keywords that were relevant to my blog post content. The crazy thing is that your most relevant keywords should be written first. That means the word or phrase used as your keyword in your post title comes first!

Reformat Content – If you want to increase search engine hits than you will need to make sure that your content is targeted towards your keywords. The main point is that you use your keyword in the first few sentences of your blog post. This is the first part of your post that the Google spider or any other search engine spider will crawl. The spiders are already biting you if your keywords are not talked about right away in your content. That means somehow you have to catch up throughout the rest of your post and it is difficult. Try to use your keywords a little throughout the middle part of your posts but this isn’t as important as using them at the beginning of the post. Then make sure that you use your keywords in the last two sentences of your post. Spiders seemed to love this.

The next part of reformatting your content to increase search engine hits is to use your headline tags. You know what your keywords are from using the Google keyword tool. One way to emphasize that words are important in your blog post is by using headline tags. Google spiders will give you a higher search engine ranking if your keywords are used in headline tags. Just make sure you surround your keywords with other words so it doesn’t throw up a red flag that you are just trying to get a better ranking. One thing that will penalize you is if you use headline tags too often. So using them once or twice in a post is just about right.

Internal linking is also important when you are trying to increase search engine hits. This will give you free links to your own posts. What you want to do is link to one of your blog posts if you have used a word or phrase you are trying to target. For example, I used the phrase search engine ranking which is a phrase I use as a keyword for one of my post. I would then make a link to that post the phrase “search engine ranking”. The post then gets a higher ranking for that keyword. Most keywords that I target seem to be longtail keywords.

Search Engine Friendly URLs – Your URL needs to have your targeted keyword in it. There are many plugins for WordPress that will take out words that are not relevant, such as and, to, but, and others. However, you may use some of these words as part of your phrases you are trying to target. If you’re trying to target the phrase how to blog, then you would want your URL to have the word to. So I recommend not using these plugins and just rewriting your URLs manually.

What else should you try? Use images in your blog posts and use the alt tag. Try to put one of your weaker keywords as your alt tag. Image searches are huge so you might as well get easy traffic.

Those are all the steps I took to increase my search engine hits. If you have not been getting the traffic you like from search engines, then follow all the steps I have taken to increase my search engine hits 300%.

Tagged as: Conte, Enter Keyword, Google, Google Keyword Tool, Google Web, Keyword Ideas, Keyword Search, Lot, Love, Paragraphs, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Search Google, Search Optimization, Search Tool, Traffic, Unique Visitors, Web Page