As we all know, Search Engine traffic is the main traffic source of most popular blogs. If you are looking to increase blog traffic effectively, start from Blog SEO first. Bloggers love search engine traffic for some reasons:

1. A passionate blogger love to post new stuff on their blogs. They are more interested in sharing new things about their topic instead of marketing and getting traffic. Search engine allows them to drive a steady stream of visitors to their blog automatically. This allow them to focus of finding good and interesting content.

2. Blogs have extra advantages over normal websites when it comes to SEO. Google loves blogs because blogs always update fresh content about their topic.

In this post, I’m going to explain how Google rank blogs and websites. Before reading, I just want to say that everything in this post is not the truth. Everything is based on news, successful experiences and assumptions THAT WORKS. No one except Google understand their own algorithm.

Are you ready for the story how Google rank blogs and websites?

Here you go:

Imagine you own a Food Blog. You want to publish a posts about the best food in Japan. How would you rank different kind of food?

You’ll probably start with observing yourself first and then get people’s vote. This is the same way how Google rank blogs and sites: Observe and Getting Votes.

1. Observe:

Back to Food Blog owner. You might buy lots of japanese food and put all of them on a table. Next, you’ll analyze the material, the taste, the look and the smell.

2. Getting Votes

Analyzing yourself doesn’t give an accurate rating for those foods because ‘Observing’ is solely your own opinion and your own taste. By getting lots of opinion and votes from others, you’ll get an answer that is much more accurate.

Same as Google. They observe and get votes in a very similar but much more complicated way!

1. How Google Observe

Google’s staff don’t observe sites and webpages one by one. It is not very possible to read and analyze billions of websites and possibly trillions of webpages which are changing daily. They have program that read webpages like human called the Google Bot. Google Bot are sent to observe, read and analyze the webpages.

Instead of taste, look, smell and materials, they analyze title tags, meta tags, keyword density, how often it is updated, related keywords in the same page, etc.

2. Google Get Votes

Google also knows that their Bot will not do a very accurate job in ranking. So, they get votes from others. These votes are called the backlinks.

If your website is not a good resource, do you think other websites will introduce, refer or recommend your website with a link. There are different kinds of links and each links mean differently!

Normal Link: Different website owners might link to your blog differently. The link might looks like “http://your-blog.com”, “click here”, “Blog Name”, etc. These links are basically just a vote to your blog that doesn’t tells Google what they are voting. In the case of Food Blog, these votes are like a blank vote. You don’t know whether this votes are trying to vote the best food or the cheapest food.

Links With Your Keywords: These votes are much more powerful. Linking to your blog with certain keywords is like telling Google this website or webpages is good at something. It’s a specific vote.

One-way Link: This kind of links have more weight. This means that your blog is linked from a website without you linking back to them.

Two-way Link: It means your link to someone and someone link to you. This is one of the SEO startegies that was not very popular anymore. If you vote someone because you want them to vote you, do you think it’s genuine? Or a kind of manipulation? Google realized many websites are using massive link exchange to build lots of links. They give much lower ratings for such links.

Link From Authority Sites: Let’s talk about food blogger again! When you are getting votes from different people, a famous food critic came in front you and vote for one of the Japanese food. Will you take that vote as a normal vote or a high quality and reliable vote?

Same as websites. There are websites with high authorities such as Yahoo.com, About.com, some government sites, etc. These sites usually have high PageRank and their links means a lot more than a normal link.

This is how Google rank sites and how SEO is done. Although it is a very basic theory, it is always good to understand more about it. I always use a similar example to the Food Blog as a guideline for blog SEO. It works for me and hope it works for you too.

Good luck in SEOing your blog!



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