Basic SEO For Your Blog Posts

As you know, I think SEO is a fantastic tool for bloggers. Bloggers really want to make money blogging. Google loves unique content from subject matter experts. A perfect marriage. But there are many technical barriers to getting there. And this is where most bloggers fail.
A great blogger has to have SEO capabilities
In this blogger tutorial, I am going to give you the basic instructions to run through a real-world blogger SEO experiment of your own. From beginning to end, I want to show you the basics of the SEO process in a very practical way. I have blogged about the importance of blog keywords before. But in that post I was addressing the issue of keyword selection for your blog at the strategic level.

This blogger tutorial will show you exactly how to rank a specific blog post in Google
Let's get started.
Step 1: Pick your target keyword

This starts with our familiar Google keyword research tool. As I've told you before, this is a free tool where Google shares with us their search volumes on any keyword ask about. Additionally, Google offers you suggested keywords for you to use that are related to what you might think are great keywords (and sometimes aren't). This is critical data as you craft the keyword space you want to dominate with your blogging. For this blogger tutorial, I want you to pick a long-tale keyword that will be very easy to rank on, but is also related to your blog's theme. Why pick an easy term? Picking an easy keyword phrase will give you a much deeper appreciation for the process of search engine optimization because you will see it work all the way through to completion (trust me on this). For this blogger tutorial I am pretending that my blog is about Toyota trucks and off-roading and I have selected the keyword phrase "toyota tundra chattanooga" because I live in the Southeastern portion of the US. Yes, Google tells me that this search term gets 0 searches per month. And in the real world, I would never pick this term. But for the tutorial it's perfect. You should NOT pick this same term as me for reasons we will get into later. But pick something with at least 3 words in it. Step 2: Check the competition on this keyword phrase in Google
The next step in this blogger tutorial is to run a query in Google on your selected target keyword phrase with quotes around it. This is known as a "Phrase Match" search. Ignoring the fancy name, just stick your keyword into Google.com with double-quotes around it. Yes, simple run the query on "toyota tundra chattanooga".

You can see that the term I selected for this blogger tutorial has 12,700 results in Google (based on my phrase match search). These results may differ by location and certainly change over time. But what does this number mean? Think of this number as a measure of the competition in the Google database on this specific keyword phrase. For this blogger tutorial, I want you to find a phrase that has fewer than 100 results (when run with quotes). Why: Because this means there is very little competition on the keyword phrase. If you have to go to a 4-word phrase to find something that is relevant to your blog, that's fine for the tutorial.
Step 3: Write a blog post using this keyword phrase
This is no problem right? In step 1 we selected a keyword phrase that was related to your blogging topic, so using this phrase in the blog post is perfectly natural and easy. But pay attention; I want you to use the exact phrase we are trying to rank on at least 6 times. Your blog post needs to be at least 200 words long. If you do the math, that puts your target keyword phrase at about 3.0% of the total words. (6/200) = 3.0%. Perfect. I love writing blog posts at 3% keyword density. That should work just fine. Be sure to proof read. Also, it's a great idea to use different variations of your target keyword phrase. This is very natural as well. But be sure that your primary target keyword is used at least 3% of the time. I'm sure there are free online keyword density checkers, if you know of a good one please email it to me and I'll update this blogger tutorial with a link.

Step 4: Post your blog post at Blogskinny.com Okay - This sounds very self-serving, but I have a good reason for having you post here rather than at your blog. Blogskinny.com is a PR5 with over 300,000 backlinks. This means that your story will get indexed and ranked MUCH MUCH faster. For this blogger tutorial, I urge you to use my site as your SEO laboratory so you can see how this works. If you are not comfortable with that, I understand. Feel free to use your own blog - but know that you will probably have to wait weeks or possibly months to see the end result. When I first built this blogger tutorial on toyota tundra chattanooga, it was on page 1 in Google in 20 minutes. But this is your call. Submit your post as a "Story" here and pretend that you are posting it on your blog. Blogskinny is going to ask for the URL to the story, for this exercise, just use the URL to your ABOUT page on your blog. Once the submission is accepted, copy the URL that Blogskinny gives you back for the story. You will need this URL in step 5. If you lose it, you can find it again by clicking on "Recent" on Blogskinny top menu bar.
Step 5: Bookmark the story page your created on Blogskinny.com
So now we have a well-written story on a target keyword phrase with appropriate density. We have submitted it to Blogskinny for this blogger tutorial (pretending it was posted on our blog). Now we need to alert Google that this new awesome unique content is ready for them. Their spiders are very hungry and ready to digest your content. And they are amazingly fast. But you need to point them in the right direction. Take the Blogskinny story URL link we got in step 4 and submit it to Mixx.com, Digg.com and Del.icio.us. You should have active accounts at all of those (and many more) already. If not, built them now. You will repeat this process many times as you promote your blog. For each of these 3 bookmark submissions, write totally unique content in the description. Use the keyword phrase in the description, in the title and in the tag selection. The bookmarks on these very strong social bookmarking sites will lead the Google spiders to the story page on Blogskinny. The spiders will immediately identify the content as new and unique and they will put it in their vast search database.
Step 6: Wait
The safest bet is to check Google tomorrow. But if you have selected a sufficiently uncompetitive term, you may see results in as fast as 20 minutes. I did when I built this blogger tutorial. Here are the results for the fake keyword term I selected for this blogger tutorial below:

Conclusions:
This blogger tutorial showed you many important steps in the search engine optimization process for bloggers. From keyword selection, competition analysis, onsite keyword density and link-building, you walked through the basic steps that pretty much any website goes through to rank on any specific keyword. As you know, SEO is a bloggers' best friend. Complete this tutorial on a phrase that is appropriate to your blog and see it work on Blogskinny. Then start thinking about how you can do the same on your blog for more competitive keywords. No, competitive keywords will not rank in a day. Those can take years, but the process is the same. Also think about how you can best use powerful websites like Blogskinny to your advantage. If you think about it, the page you built in this blogger tutorial now ranks on a term that is valuable to your blog. And it has a link to your blog. We pointed that link to your ABOUT page in step 4. But you can point story links at Blogskinny (or Digg, Mixx, wherever) at any internal page you like.... Interesting. As you start to extrapolate this type of thinking you will see how you can build rings of relevant links to your specific blog posts... Trust me, this is a VERY fruitful path for you to be thinking about. Most people miss it, or can't quite get their heads around it. I believe that once you actually complete the steps in this blogger tutorial you will be well on your way to boosting your blogs SEO.
P.S. Complete this tutorial and contact me: I'll review your work and link to you.