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.

If you have read my articles about what you should be blogging about 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 niche, as opposed to a lifeless factsheet. So, how do you get your words where others can read them? No matter how delicious your content is, if nobody knows it exists you cant generate profit from it. Traffic 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 onto 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 that will not stop you from learning some simple, yet effective techniques, to conquer the search engines for certain keywords. The more complex techniques are usually needed to fight for very competitive and general keywords such as "fat loss". Ill teach you how to overcome that later.

For now, lets determine the best keywords to optimize your site for.

For example, your blog talks about tech gadgets. Now, youd want to check in Google whether it is a very competetive keyword. At this time of writing, there are 29, 000 ,000 (twenty-nine-million!) search results. Think you can beat 29,000,000 sites at your first attempt? I dont think so. In fact, I know absolutely that you cannot.

Lets try to narrow our scope to keywords you can successfully optimize for. Lets look for the keywords - technological gadgets. At this time of writing, Google lists 792,000 results. Thats more manageable but still not narrow enough. You would still need to search for more focused keywords. An example is - "technological lap top gadgets", however, lets 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 youre 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 can change the title of your blog in the Blogger control panel or the Wordpress blog when youre creating it. If youre proficient with HTML, you can even do that on other blog engines like Moveable Type. Bottom line? Learn a little HTML! Note: You will find some resources in the sidebar of this site for optimizing your blog.

Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term youre 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). Since were posting 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 headline.

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. 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.

So, keep this in mind: Write for humans, not for search engines, using your targeted keywords!

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

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

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Jim DeSantis is a 15 year broadcast News veteran. For all 6 parts of this series and more Self Help Resources on this topic and many other topics visit Jim's Newsman's Favorite Links Blog!