Optimizing your blog for fun and profit can be a daunting task. There are secret tricks of the trade that separate newbies from techies but that does not mean you cannot do some of it yourself. This article is one of a series that lifts the curtain on this shadowland of optimization.

f you have read my article about how to write for your blog, you should have a blog filled with content you have passionately written. It should be a very interesting grapevine for the community of your chosen topic, as opposed to a lifeless fact sheet. If you have not read that article, click the link in the Author Box below to read it.

Now, how do you get your writing where others can read it?

No matter how delicious your content is, if nobody knows it exists you cannot generate profit from it. Traffic (readers) is the lifeblood of your blog. In order to attract readers, you must offer exciting and unique information. Simple enough, right? Common sense? Not exactly.

You see, to get traffic to your site, you have to think backwards.

Where do people look when they need information? Yes, they search using search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, to name the more popular ones.

So, to get these people to visit your blog, your blog needs to rank high on results pages of these search engines. When people search for information through the search engines and see your site among the top results, they will naturally click through to your blog.

The art of getting your blog or website high rankings on search results pages is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It is a complex and technical subject to master, but do not let that stop you from learning some simple, yet effective techniques, to conquer the search engines. You can do it with certain keywords. More complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive keywords such as "fat loss". We will not look at those. Instead, here is how to overcome the competition by finding targeted keywords.

We want to find the best keywords to optimize your site for.

For example, we will say that your blog is all about tech gadgets. Now, you want to check in Google whether it is a very competitive keyword. At any given time there are about 29, 000 ,000 (twenty-nine-million!) search results for tech gadgets. Think you can beat 29,000,000 sites at your first attempt using the same keywords they use? I don’t think so. In fact, I know absolutely that you cannot because your competitors have purchased those keywords to guarantee a top position. It cost them big bucks to buy the top rankings!

Since you likely do not have a huge advertising budget, narrow your scope to keywords you can successfully optimize for. Search the keywords - “technological gadgets”. At this time of writing, Google lists 792,000 results. That’s more manageable but still way too much competition. You still need to search for more focused keywords. An example is - "technological lap top gadgets". However, let’s optimize your blog for "technological gadgets" just for the sake of learning.

First, you have to pay attention to the title of your blog. Since you are optimizing for technological gadgets, you need to have that exact phrase in your blog title.
For example, a line like “Your Best Technological Gadget Blog!” would work great.

You should be able to change the title of your blog in the blog control panel of your blog service. If you’re proficient with HTML, you can do it on just about any blog engine. You may need to learn a little HTML. You will find some resources in the sidebar of my blog for optimizing your blog. See the link in my Author Box.

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you are optimizing for. The page heading is the bit of text in your template code that is enclosed within the tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about (in this case, “technological gadgets”).

What is a tag? Since we’re posting on a blog, the tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant. For example, write an article/post titled - "Cheap Technological Gadgets for Everyone!". It has your keywords in the title of the post. This is the tag that Search Engines will find when someone searches for “technological gadgets”.

You should also sprinkle the words “technological gadgets” in your posts whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint to the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic. But, don't overdo it. Use of the term "technological gadgets" just a couple of times in your posts is quite enough. More than that and it may appear as spam to the search engines and, more important, your readers will feel the same way.

Warning: The real downside to over use of the same keywords in a single article is that the search engines may de-list your blog and you will be cast out into the internet darkness. They may see it as spamming.

So, keep this in mind: Write for humans, not for search engines, and use your targeted keywords sparingly in your posts!

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.