1. Think of a good post title

At least one of your keywords that your article will be focused on, needs to enter your title. If you are going to speak about candies and want your article to appear in the search engine, put the word Candy or its derivatives in the post title:

• Everything about candies
• 10 Candy tricks
• 5 things you don’t know about candies
• White chocolate Candies + Caviar?!
• Each candy is sappy, and keeps the dentist happy
• etc.

2. Post shortlink/permalink should equal Title.

It is simple:

• This link http://www.candies.org/?p=984 is ordinary.
• This link http://www.candies.org/10_candy_tricks is SEO optimized.

All blogging software and CMS platforms have options to change this. Make sure you do It in the beginning of your blogging career. Otherwise you will need some digging in old articles you wrote to recheck the links you already made to your other articles and replace the links. The other bad thing will be, that your site is already indexed. For search engines It will look like part of your blog disappeared :D. Do It as soon as you can.

3. Your chosen keyword in <H1>, <H2> and <H3> tags

While indexing your site, the search engines will have a look at your headings. All the words between the <h> tags will weight more in the search results. So if you speak about candies, make sure you insert sub Titles and Headings inside the article that point chapters like “<h1>About  brown candies </h1>”. There are some SEO optimizing software suites that make this for you. I’ve seen the promotional movie @ http://www.seopressor.com/ and am quite impressed.

It is quite expensive software though. And I am not rich blogger 😉

4. Emphasize keywords

… in Bold, Italic and Underline. This is not 100% SEO checked so far. It does look more pretty though. I’ve never seen my bold text to be explicitly scoured for keywords in search engines. And I use the <b> <i> and <u> tags a lot. Even if this is not checked in real life, it gives to the reader more points to focus his attention.

This image's <alt> says Candy 😀

5. Add <alt> tags in images.

This way they enter Image searches for your chosen keyword too. It is also very simple, edit the image’s HTML tags and change the one, that says alt=”something”:

<img title=”alt” src=”https://www.m0rd0r.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/alt-150×150.jpg” alt=”candy” width=”150″ height=”150″ />

Regardless the image says <alt> for picture search engines this images means “Candy”. They can’t decide if the picture has candy on it or not. The only means they know what this picture is about is this ALT tag we just replaced with “Candy”.

6. Density of keyword

Keywords ~ 1.5 – 2% of all words. 2000 words article should mention the chosen keyword 30-40 times. This is a lot of candy :D, but again … 2000 words is quite long article too. Just spam “candy” and “candies” everywhere you can without being annoying or weird. You want your article to be above the others.

Disclaimer and Word of thought: Google and Yahoo! employ good heuristic algorithm for keywords. If you just repeat one word 2000 times, this does not mean you will get high search rank. Exactly the opposite. Your search rank will drop into the toilet until the next time the Search engines index your page. Hopefully you will get your lesson learned until then.

7. Internal links pointing to your other blog posts.

It is not JUST keywords you know. You need to know that your other Candy articles get attention too if this article you just wrote makes the readers interested. The reader attention span is very short. If he is not interested in your current article, he searches “where to click/go next”. It is good this next click to be YOUR blog/site.

There is one web metric system called “bounce rate”. Ideally you want to keep this below 75%. What does this mean?

If you have 1000 visitors per month, 750 visitors will leave your blog being NOT Interested in reading further or going somewhere else, because you have links pointing to other sites. This is 75% bounce rate (750 from 1000 left).

You want bounce rate below 75% or your search engine ranking will suffer. You want your readers to keep reading your other articles.

Enough said.

8. Be regular.

If you like blogging like me – blog. Don’t just wait for miracle 100k readers to come from nowhere. This does not happen overnight. It needs some dedication and good motivation. Some day you will find the perfect article you want to blog about and you will be noticed by everyone.

Until then – Blog about small things. Be there for us at least once a week. The search engines don’t love the sites that don’t get updated often.

If one article is old – It is simply old.

Compare this with a Newspaper article from a journalist at the distant 1934 regarding starting World  war II. It is a very good and strong article that can make you burst in tears. But …

This article will be stored by some librarian somewhere and 60 years later, probably only a few historians will make a reference to the article.

If your whole blog is 1934-ish – no one will come to read you. Only some really dedicated Google junkies like me, that delve sometimes deeper than page 40 of search results for some gems.

10. Don’t struggle having ALL of the above.

If you do, the result will be a very Keyword heavy article that will probably be in 1-st page of search results, but:

• It will be annoying and
• Hard to read, and because of this –
• Regardless of the links posted inside, the bounce rate will be high because the readers will
• Feel like they are trapped inside your keyword mish-mash

Avoid this!

At all costs!

(Bonus) 11. Be helpful.

Even if you strive to be in top 10 (page 1) of search results – It will not happen overnight. If you find something worth investigating and think you can write good article about It – DO IT!

Imagine you’ve been the one found the “unique combination of taste in white chocolate Candy with caviar”.

If you write passionate article of this little something you’ve found and you get interested visitors to read and share your article in the social networks, the corresponding search engines will be glad to raise your rating.

• Facebook reports “likes” to Bing!
• Twitter reports “tweets” to Bing!, Yahoo! and Google.
• Stumble upon reports to no engines.
• Google+ is quite self explaining.
• Yahoo!answers too.

As long as someone with huge circle of friends/readers/followers stumbles/tweets/likes or pluses your article – your visits will skyrocket as will your search engine rank.

Help the others and they will help you too.

HTH

No.

It is not.

First, you need time.

Then you need determination and motivation.

It is definitely NOT an overnight next-next-next-finish job.

And it will not pay you a penny in the first months, if you want to monetize it.

Actually in the first 4 months, this blog made less than 1 Euro.

Why?

Because of article quantity. And article quality.

Why would anyone expect that making 2-3 articles per week is more than enough to make a living from a blog. It is impossible. At least not in the beginning. And if anyone in the Internet tells you, that you will start “earning” $4000 per month NOW, they simply lie because they want your money. This is most definitely SCAM!

For the four months I mentioned (16 weeks) this means 30-50 articles. What if every article is visited once per day? How many of those visits will actually make money? (make people click on ADs)

None.

It takes 100000 visits to determine accurate CPM (Cost per 1 thousand visits). And believe me. No Chitika, no AdSense, nor any affiliate program can make you rich from 1000 visits.

What do you need to make a Blog profitable?

Readers.

How can you get readers to your blog?

Content, pictures, videos, puzzles, FUN, HOWTOs, curious stuff, game walkthroughs … whatever you are good at… and you are good … DAILY.

If you can do it, you will probably meet with successful “blogging-for-money” one day. But if you think that writing 100 articles and leaving your blog to make money will actually work – you are wrong.

A blog does not go alone by itself. The so called “automated moneymaking” – without human intervention is impossible. It takes months to establish some position as a blog-site and can take twice as long for the people to even notice you. My first few comments (happily) were friendly advices. Those advices kept me motivated and led me to find some online data about SEO (Search engine optimization). Search engines are driven by few factors. Here are few tips:

1. Uniquity of an article. If all of the articles are copy&pasted from somewhere – you will fail. Search engines hate copied content. If you are not the original writer – you will be indexed too, but your articles will not go high in the search results. And you may get warning from the original owner to remove the article.
2. Key words. If you don’t speak about what you mean – you will fail. You can’t stray from the base article heading. If you speak about trains, use the word “train” all the time, without spamming or getting weird and annoying.
3. Page [short]links SEO (search engine optimization). If you have article links www.blah.org/?p=8129 and www.blah.org/cute-mini-train-stations the second article link will show above the first in the search engines, regardless the content in both article is about “little train stations”. If the link name and article name are relevant to each other and the article content – the search engines will push you up in the results, when someone searches the keywords your article is about.
4. Usefulness. If someone clicks “Like”, “+1”, “Stumble”, tweets about you or simply posts a link on his own blog to your site – you will feel it soon. If your friends and readers tweet about your articles and link to your blog, their friends and friends of their friends may come too.
5. Page rank. Whatever site links to you – your page rank will raise a bit. If  a big site posted a link to your site – your page rank will definitely jump. And that means higher place in most search engines. If you don’t know what page rank is, refer to the Wikipedia article.

It actually took me 4 months to go from page rank ZERO to page rank 1. When Google increased my PR – The raise in visits to my blog was like 300%. I can’t disclose exact numbers because of the policies I agreed with, but it was visible in my graphs… So. To make It clear – Advertise your site to your friends and readers owning blogs. Let them link to you to quick start you a bit. You may not get High levels of traffic by just few links, but this will pay in time. This is important, regardless what the others say. If you are often linked and discussed – you WILL be noticed. And Page rank DOES matter.

If you are interested in how many backlinks do you need to attain page rank 1 with Google, have a look at this blog post.

The hard task I had put on my shoulder was to make a blog that speaks about EVERYTHING that interests me. I did not plan to make a “niche website” enslaved by few keywords. The good part is, that more keywords will enter the search engine criterion. The bad part is – big part of the blog is irrelevant to most of the readers. I am sorry to say, but part of my RSS subscribers expect new Slackware howto or game walkthrough, but instead of this – they receive a recipe for a food or some story about Me going somewhere with the bike and shooting few photos.

Sorry folks. Please come back! Don’t leave! 😀

Another important thing – You must be aware that 1 blog post takes the attention of the people interested in it for no more than a week. Than the visits drop back to normal. I’ve already seen that when going to a see resort and not posting for 2 weeks. If you don’t update your blog regularly, the search engines will put more recently updated blogs in the same niche before yours. And search engine traffic is very important. You may have some dedicated readers, but you want them to grow. And if no one can find your blog – you can’t get more readers. You will only grow by “word of mouth” from your readers that tweet about your posts or post links to your blog elsewhere.

And that growth is simply not enough.