Search Engine Optimization for Blogs

How to SEO your Blogs

For the past few weeks I have been discussing ways in which you can optimize your blogs for search engine traffic - primarily Google. This is called search engine optimization or SEO for short. I have been targeting the keyword "Payday Loans" to show you the step by step methods I use to make money online.

Ultimately I will discuss how to further tweak your blogs in order to make money using Adsense but till now I have just been focusing on general techniques that everyone should use in order to draw search traffic to your blog. Whether you are interested in Adsense or not you should still focus some attention on acquiring SE traffic - social traffic is great in so many ways but if you monetize your site you will need SE traffic to convert visitors to sales.

Today I am going to jump around a bit as I want to clarify a few things that have popped up in my emails and comments.

Self Hosted Blogs, Blogspot and Wordpress

I still get - or I should say I am seeing more emails all the time wondering why I use a free Blogger blog on Blogspot. Invariably the assumption is that I don't know that "serious" marketers use their own domains. I have also had several readers ask me about what type of blog they should use.

I have answered the first question before but it's worth going over again. The whole point of this blog is to make money and show my readers how I do it. To that end I have focused my attention on beginners and I want to show them that you really can make money online and you don't have to spend money to do it. Hence the free Blogger blog - I prefer to do it by example. I have another reason for using Blogger as well; it has some distinct advantages over other blog platforms when it comes to making money with Adsense. I will get into this further when I turn my focus to Adsense.

In regards to what platform is best I agree that having your own domain is the standard way to go if you are intent on making the A-list. Web 2.0 is the new look and self hosted wordpress blogs are all the rage. In general I find Blogger to be a great way for beginners to cut their teeth. You can learn the ins and outs about blogging without spending money and it is incredibly easy to use. A free Wordpress blog is really not a good idea as it is next to impossible to monetize it. For a good synopsis of the differences between these platforms see Blogs: Self Hosting vs Free Hosting by Terry Didcott.

Some of you that already have an A-list style blog have been asking me if it can be optimized for Adsense. It can but to really go after Adsense properly you will end up losing your aesthetic appeal. The fact is the best performing Adsense sites aren't pretty. You have to set up the site in such a way as to capitalize clicks or you won't make enough to bother with it. In the simplest terms you have to display the ugly and in your face ad block just like I have above the fold on this blog. To make any serious money you will have to do the same - most of you don't want that on your "nice" blogs so I suggest starting a new blog specifically aimed at Adsense and just tweak your A-list blogs in order to capture search engine traffic. If you are monetizing with paid ads then you'll need the SE visitors.

One question I was asked was, "Why is search engine traffic better for making money than social traffic?".

The obvious answer is because social traffic is comprised of internet marketers for the most part and they don't typically click ads or buy stuff. Perhaps the better answer is to skip ahead in my Payday Loan lessons and actually show you a completed campaign where I set out to target a keyword in order to rank high on Google's listings and how I have made money from it.

In January I wrote a review of a program I had tried out called "Project Payday". The program deals with making money by buying and selling referrals on IFW's (incentivized freebie websites). While there are things I don't like about the program (the type of work mostly - boring) the end result is that it is a legitimate way of earning some money online. It actually works which is something you can't say to often online. At the time I suspected this might get popular but in truth I was only guessing. Shortly after I posted the review someone linked to me from the whydowork forum citing my post in regards to a question some one had asked. Before long there was a steady stream of visitors coming to my blog because of that link. They weren't making me any money but it led me to believe that there was interest in the program. I decided to target the keyword for Google to see if there was interest in the non IM world.

To do this I wrote several more articles optimized for the keyword "Project Payday" as well as for all the relevant long tail terms. I then submitted some to article directories to get some optimized links back to my posts. I managed to climb to 5 and 6 on Google's index and haven't bothered going any higher - I don't need to.

Look at the screenshot below;



With the exception of the Project Payday site all the top results point to my blog - the answer on Yahoo Answers has a link to me and of course the whydowork forum has the link I mentioned earlier. Aside from those going directly to the Project Payday site I get most of the search traffic for that term. In fact Google tells me in webmaster tools that I get 61% of all the people searching for the term. I was able to generate a lot of backlinks in the beginning using articles that other's published on their sites - each article had a link using the anchor text "project payday" or "project payday review" and it didn't take long to get to 5th on the serp. Remember when you target a term that has little to no competition you can rank well with no backlinks at all if you have enough relevant content. If there is a bit of competition you can overcome it with a few decent backlinks - you usually don't need many. How many others were seriously targeting my term? Probably only a few at most and how hard would they work at it? Not that hard - I had only 2-3 links and was a PR0 at the time I landed 5th spot.

I want to interrupt the flow for a second and deal with some confusion over the issue of backlinks vs content. One of my readers left a comment the other day that addresses this concern...

Jasa said...

ok i just had information overload for two things. Both related to SEO though. Thought you might be able to clarify.

Brad Callen, the creator of SEO elite wrote in his huge Ebook, that the important part in SEO is the off page optimization (though on page is still important but not as important). Which basically refers to backlinking.

On the other hand, your experiments are starting to show that its more the other way round.

Hmm, do you mind clarifying on this? Thx! :)


My personal thoughts are that off page optimization are important to get crawled and ranked well in G's index but on page is the one that gets you on the page(SERPs) that you want. Is that true to any extent?

Notwithstanding the fact that Brad Callen is selling a product designed to get backlinks it is not surprising that he would push for their importance. In truth he is right to a certain extent but not in every circumstance. The easiest way to explain this is to think in terms of competition.

If two blogs write a post on the same topic Google will rank them in order of relevance, backlinks, PR and then by a host of other measures like age, monetization, purpose (is one selling the product and the other not?), Video (does on offer more choices for the reader) and so on.

I have mentioned this before but take a look at the top ten sites on most search queries and you can see a pattern.

Google does not just list the ten sites with the highest PR on any given topic.They strive to give the reader choices. If a reader wants to know what others think about a particular product then Google will present them with a list of the top sites reviewing the product. If all the sites are selling the product then Google will drop some and find the most relevant site that isn't and include it in the list - higher than it would normally have ranked. If there is a video available on another site not listed then it will get bumped up as well. If there is a non monetized site that is relevant it will also get bumped up. Google presents a list of what it thinks is most relevant to your search - if you want a review of something then you don't just want sites selling the product - you probably want to hear other opinions about it or maybe see a video or find out what a site that isn't monetized and has nothing to gain from the review might have to say.

Of course different queries will get different results but Google tries to read your "intent" when compiling it's index. To this end they do not just present PR (read backlinks) dominant sites. They present the most relevant (read content) first even if it has less PR than 20 others. PR does not play a factor until competition increases to a point that all other factors are equal. In general you will need a higher PR to rank better than another site that is equal to you in all other aspects.

To sum this up you need content first and then backlinks. Without the content optimized for the right keywords you can have all the PR you want and not get listed well. In truth you use both in tandem to dominate the serp's but backlinks are not as important until you are up against stiff competition.

The interesting thing is that you can make money without going after highly competitive terms and this brings me back to the Project Payday example. My review didn't include an affiliate link and this had several consequences. Instead of trying to sell Project Payday I explained what the system was about and gave my readers a bunch of links and instructions that they could use to get started without paying the membership to Project Payday. This curried favor with lot's of readers and soon a number of sites were linking to me and telling their readers to check me out regarding Project Payday. Traffic started coming from both the whydowork forum and from other blogs and soon I was getting 100-200 visitors a day. Some of you are probably wondering why I didn't have an affiliate link and the reason was simple; my traffic was comprised of internet marketers and they wouldn't have used my link anyways. I was after Adsense clicks and that's why I wanted to rank well on Google.

The end result is that there is now barely a trickle of traffic coming from whydowork which never converted to Adsense clicks as the thread has grown cold. But, no sooner did I get ranked on the front page on the serp's than traffic started rolling in from the general public and this blog started making Adsense revenue. Ten months later I still get lots of daily traffic and on top of it all Project Payday recently started paying for leads which has meant more earnings for me.

This screenshot shows my earnings from sending leads to Project Payday



This is a prime example of how a small blog can make money in less competitive niches. I have targeted lots of other keywords as well; "Roadmap to Riches", "Two Minute profits", "Yahoo Answers" etc and even well known Guru names - basically anything that I think people will search for in sufficient quantities to click my ads. Remember also that in the process of optimizing my pages for the serps for these terms I have also optimized my pages for the best Adsense ads as well. When someone visits me looking for info on my new keyword "Payday Loans" I will have payday loan ads on my page for them to click as soon as they realize that I am not what they were looking for.

I just took a screenshot of the last half hours worth of traffic to my site according to my statcounter. Check it out,



These are all the recent terms people have used to find my site and the search engine they used. Every term on that list has been optimized for and I didn't just get the traffic by luck. (You'll notice that I am already getting traffic for Payday Loans and I just started that Campaign) Because most of my traffic is search related I know that everyday I will make about $10 with Adsense per 100 SE visitors. This ratio varies from site to site on my network but after 11 months this seems to be the norm for this blog. My goal is simple - increase my search traffic by adding new keywords to this blog and by tweaking my existing keywords so that they reach top billing.

The importance of the top search listing.

I mentioned previously that I have a blog that makes about half of all my Adsense Income by itself. It is in the Fishing niche but only arm's length. It regularly makes $60 - $80 a day in Adsense and I have had some incredible 4 digit affiliate sales days as well. I first came across the main keyword by accident - I had used the term a few times in a post that was loosely related and Google picked it up and sent me traffic. I didn't think much about it but soon noticed that there was a steady if small stream of traffic coming daily. I checked my rank and saw I was listed on page two of the serps.

Here is a big tip - if you start getting steady traffic for any term not listed on the first page of the serp's then you might want to tweak it. This usually tells you the demand is decent. I tweaked my post and wrote a couple of more that highlighted the keyword and within a day I was in 6th spot. Traffic tripled and on top of it Google placed some ideal ads on my page. Overnight I went from a $2 a day Adsense site to $15 a day site. All this took was a couple of new posts and no backlinks. Like an idiot I stopped tweaking and walked around with a smug grin on my face thinking how clever I was. I was an idiot because two months later the traffic hadn't died off but had actually increased and it wasn't until then that I wondered just how much traffic the number 1 position got. I tweaked away and this time had to round up a posse of backlinks but I got to number 1 and now I make $80 a day on a good day. Money I could have been making for the two months I thought I was so clever. I guess I am trying to tell you not to stop until you reach number 1.

This in a nutshell is how you drive search engine traffic to your site. Whether you use Adsense or not - you still need traffic from Google. It doesn't matter what your blog is about - you can and should concentrate on optimizing your posts so that you highlight all the terms that are relevant to you and then tweak those that you receive traffic for. As you build up these keywords your search traffic will steadily increase. As this increases you will notice that your blog will see more clicks and sign ups. More traffic more money - it's not rocket science.

On a parting note I have been asked about optimizing for yahoo and other engines. I used to spend time with my websites trying to go after the Yahoo and MSN market but haven't bothered with my blogs. The main reason is part lazy and part cautious. Yahoo and others still attach relevance to Meta Tags which Google ignores. Blogger doesn't use Meta Tags (go figure - Google owns Blogger) so there would be work involved in modifying the template to include them and aside from being lazy I am worried that this might bugger up Google's love of the Blogger template. I alluded to this earlier but one of the things I like about Blogger is that it is perfectly optimized for Google and Adsense. A blogger blog is easy for a bot to read and categorize. I will discuss this more in future.

Having said that I would encourage wordpress users to definately go after Yahoo et al, but Google is still the priority. They easily send the most traffic so don't appease Yahoo by sacrificing Google. I should point out that since each has it's own priorities you can lower your ranking on one engine by trying to raise it on another. If you don't know what you are doing best to just target Google.

I will be updating my progress with "Payday Loans" next post for those that have been following along and getting into more details on how to fine tune your on page optimization.

Until then,

Griz