I'd like to go over some of the basic things that every blogger should know about SEO, even if you are a total beginner. There is a ton of information out there on search engine optimization and it can seem quite overwhelming at first. So what I've done here in this article is boiled it down to the very basics. This is the very least you should know about SEO.

Good SEO Starts With a Good Domain Name

When you plan to create a new blog and you are about to purchase a domain, give some serious consideration to choosing a good name. Don't get impatient when you realize that all of the domain names that you want seem to be taken already. That's how it is. But if you try hard enough and think about it you can probably find a good, short and memorable domain name. It's really important to have your main keyword in the name and preferably in the very beginning.

Optimizing Meta Tags

I'm not going to get into this too much because it is somewhat complicated and would go beyond the scope of this article. But at the very least you should know how to properly use title tags <title> and header tags <h1>. This will tell the search engines what is important about your post or page.

The first thing you should  understand is that search engines view a page differently than humans do. They are looking to see what the page is about. There are certain features of a page that search engines read as being more important. This is where title and header tags come in. You can help the search engine figure out what your page is about by putting your keywords in the title and header tags.

Header tags separate your article into sections and appear as bold lettering. <h1> is a really big lettering and <h6> is much smaller. So <h1> tags are viewed as more important to the search engines than say an <h2> tag. So if your article is about is about real estate but you have giant headers that say "DUCKS", the search engines will likely think that your article is about ducks.

Title tags are very important as they tell search engines quite a bit about the content of your post. That's how a search engine sees it. Your title appears in the title bar at the top of your browser as well as in the search results.

The point is to put your keywords in the title and in your headers if you want to rank for those terms. This is easy to do and is very effective and you should always bear this in mind when writing your posts.

Choosing a Topic For Your Blog Post

Pick a highly specific topic to avoid heavy competition. This makes it easier for you to rank for your keywords. This also has the added benefit of attracting a more targeted visitor. The folks visiting your blog will be much more interested in reading your post or perhaps purchasing your products.

Optimize Your Content

There are a couple of ways to think about optimizing your content. The first way is related to your keywords. It's a really good idea to repeat your keywords through out your article. Keyword density is a factor that search engines take into consideration. You've got to be careful though not to make Google mad. If you stuff too many keywords into your post you may get flagged as spam. Try to keep your keyword density around 3%.

The other way to think about optimizing your content lies in the style of your post. Informative and resourceful articles always attract links from other bloggers and web surfers. People bookmark pages that they find really handy or especially enlightening.

Controversial blog posts that are written with some passion are also great link grabbers! Even if someone hates your article because of your point of view, you will still get links like crazy. People will want to bash your article and send their friends to your site to leave comments. It works like a charm! Especially on political blogs.

Building Links

Something that every blogger needs to know is that building links is one of the most important things to do to achieve some presence online.  A link is counted as a vote for your site. The more links you have the more important your site is.

Some SEO's go as far as to say that your should spend the majority of your time building relevant links. See, if your blog is about dog food and your links come from blogs about making money online, then they are useless links. You need to have links from blogs within your niche.

Links can come from "do follow" blogs or "no follow" blogs. A "no follow" link is a link that the Google bot is told not to follow. So although a visitor can click that link and get to your blog, the Google bot wont follow it to your blog.

On the other hand a "do follow" link tells the Google bot to follow the link to your blog. This is how you get pagerank, which is one of the factors that come into play when the search engines rank your blog.

Inner Linking Helps SEO

Let's not forget to build links in your blog. You should link lots of your articles to one another. This not only helps your visitors get around your blog (which in itself is good for SEO) but it also helps the search engines index the deep pages. You should of course take care to use plenty of anchor text when creating your inner link structure.

In Conclusion

SEO is an ongoing process that takes time. As you become more experienced with SEO you'll find there are many things you can do to constantly tweak your blog. The basic outline I have given you here should be enough to get you started and headed in the right direction. These are just the basics but they are the things that <em>every blogger should know about SEO</em>.