Seven mistakes you should avoid in developing your SEO strategy

1. Using the Wrong Keywords
Customers find products by typing questions into search engines. If your keywords don’t answer the questions that customers will be asking, then you need a new SEO strategy.

2. Disregarding the Title Tag
A title tag is essential in defining the content for a particular page. Without it, search engines and customers will disregard your website.

3. Lack of Consistency and Maintenance
Imagine a model who didn’t take care of herself for an entire year. No makeup, no showers, no change of clothes. Would anyone pay attention? The same is true for a website without proper updates and maintenance; search engines will ignore them as well.

4. Only Having Images for Headings
A picture is worth a thousand words, unless it’s being indexed by a search engine. Images don’t convey enough information for search engines to properly index your site.

5. Ignoring URLs
Proper page name structure, especially the URL name, plays a principal part in attracting organic keywords to your website.

6. Lack of Keyword Specific Content
Online content is king. It’s essential to have pages that use the right keywords to describe your product or services.

7. Paying for Search Terms You Could Have for Free
Why pay for something you could have gotten for free? Don’t utilize pay-per-click terms if you could have received the same traffic for free using organic SEO.

Article Copied from : 

http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/seo-dc/search-engine-optimization-dc/sbwire-148528.htm

10 reasons why seo is important for Blog

1. SEO is not a Hack

SEO is of two types. White hat SEO and Black hat SEO. White hat SEO is something which is recognized by search engines and they publish the guidelines for it also (Yes, there is a guidelines from Google too). Black Hat SEO is basically a way to cheat search engines and if you get caught there are huge penalties. Hence SEO (always White Hat in this article) is not a hack but recognized standard. You master it and search engine would be much happy to present you at the top of the results.

2. Traffic

SEO has a potential to draw tremendous traffic to your blog. Forget everything, if your articles are at top of search results you need not care about other forms to draw traffic. The opportunity to draw traffic is so huge that people have literally made huge bucks in short amount of time.

3. Search Engine Fodder

It is a term used when your articles are never found in top pages of search page and it seems that search engines has digested and forgotten about it. This is primarily due to competition for specific terms and implementation of poor SEO techniques. Remember, if SEO is done in a right manner, the article stands a chance to compete in top results irrespective of competition.

4. Aligns Your Thinking

Once you start to think from SEO perspective, you start to approach an article in terms of keywords searched by users. This provides an interesting perspective from the angle of demand in the market. Once you know about the demand there is every reason to satisfy it by writing SEO enriched articles. Wordtracker, Overture,adwords etc. provides important tools to help you get feel of the demand.

5. SEO helps generates Ideas

Once traffic starts flowing to your blog, you can monitor the flow through sites like hittail, mybloglog etc. The insight into what people use in terms of keywords (short and long tail) at times helps you generate lot of ideas. Many times you would find that title of your next post comes from terms searched by the user, something which you haven’t ever thought of.

6. Competition

An insight into SEO would help you to look at competition from entirely different angle. Not only would you know what strategy they are using but also what keywords are bringing them traffic. You would read their articles and would be in a comfortable position to comprehend their strategy. Additionally there are sites like alexa, compete.com etc. which lists the keywords that brings them traffic. Once you have knowledge of this you can definitely eat into their market share.

7. SEO Takes Little Time

SEO takes little time and is not all that complex. It is a myth people have in their mind because whatever they have heard till now is in terms of business websites and not blogs. Remember, business website needs a concentrated approach in one direction while in blog an approach changes with every post.

8. Validation

The results from SEO show up on your face. So if any blog post is not attracting traffic you have an opportunity to change it. While a minimum of about 4%-5% articles normally contribute to traffic in your blog through search engines but if you not achieving this figure than you should re-look at your strategy. SEO helps to validate your efforts in terms of results that show up in form of traffic.

9. Check Mistakes

Every bit of incoming or no traffic provides you an opportunity to check mistakes. The steps in SEO can be changed time and again till the time you achieve desired results. The effort spent in first few posts would make you knowledgeable enough not to commit the same mistake in subsequent posts.

10. Helps You Grow

SEO has this uncanny habit to not only make you slog but also make wise with time. Soon you would find that your way to approach content and market has changed. You would find yourself more aligned to needs of your readers than fictitious thoughts in your mind. This is an essential step which would help you gain a rightful entry into blogging world (the place which is full of competition).

Are you convinced now that SEO is must for your blog and at any time it should not be ignored? How you do it would be covered in next series of articles but you must be signed to work hard on it. It is always advisable to spend more time in one SEO oriented post than write plenty of posts. The logic – “Your content would be of no use if there are not enough people to appreciate it.”


Article copied from :- http://techpp.com/2009/08/11/10-reasons-why-seo-is-important-for-your-blog/