Ever wondered how you could show up better on local Search Engine Result Pages. Well its pretty simple. Its not rocket science. Oh and if you don’t know what SERP is then I should tell you what it is. Well its basically the results you get after you do a search at a search engine.

ccTLD

Now I’m assuming that you have a bit of basic SEO done. Okay first of all, you need your ccTLD (country code top level domain). Like United States has .us, UK has .co.uk and Canada has .ca. Got it? Now if you don’t know your ccTLD then check this out.

Local Web Host

Now you know what your ccTLD is. So go get one. Like mysite.co.uk or something. After you’ve done that look for a local web host. You need to make sure that they are hosted in the same country as you are. It might cost a bit more but its worth it (at least for SEO purposes).

And that’s it. Yep! Its that simple. Told you, it wasn’t rocket science. Just be patient and do some general SEO and advertising and you’ll get the sweet results pretty soon.

Now there are a lot of blogs out there and that means competition. A lot more competition everyday. And you want your blog to be a popular and successful one. Well you could say that you want some traffic to your blog. So, right now I’ll tell you about some stuff that could get you some traffic.

First of all, we all know that people love free stuff! Yeah you can’t say that people don’t like free stuff. People will even take the crappiest thing, if its free. So, I think you know what I’m going to say. Yeah give some free stuff to people. Now it doesn’t have to be something big or like something that you will have to ship it to them. Give them something like a template, fonts, scripts, e-books and there are tons of stuff that you can give them. People really appreciate free stuff. Well sometimes there might be an exception. Lets not talk about that.

You want your blog to have it’s own domain name which is pretty easy to remember. Now of course, it would be pretty difficult to remember a long URL and you can also say that it is a negative side. And you want to blog about something particular. But then again it’s not always possible, like I blog about a lot of different things but they are somewhat related. But try to stick to a general topic like technology. Where you might write only about cameras or you could even talk about cameras, cellphones, computers, etc. But I would also suggest that you don’t blog on stuff like dragons. Because you wouldn’t really have a lot to right about them.

Another thing that you could do is, comment on other blogs. Now I’m talking about comments which are relevant to the post and not spam. When you comment on other blogs (especially popular ones), people might like your comments and then visit your blog if there is link. Or you could even provide a URL to a post that you wrote and it’s related to the post on the other blog(s).

There are tons of things you could do. But what really matters is that if your content is good or not. Your blog has to provide the best information on the topic that you write about and not just be a good one.

This is probably the biggest mistakes people make in SEO. Maybe even in daily life in some ways. The thing is that people want traffic to their site. Actually lots and lots of traffic. They dream about having a million visitors every month. But what’s the point of it? I mean why would you want a million visitors to your site? Well it’s not like someone will pay you if you get a million visitors every month or something. Sounds kind of weird, doesn’t it?

Okay for example you are selling something. I don’t know what you are selling but you are selling stuff online. And you want a lot of people visiting your online store. But what’s the point of getting a huge amount of traffic if no one really buys your product? Like they visit your site and just go away. Yeah do you get it now? You want a good quality of traffic. Don’t think about quantity. You want people who will buy your product (it’s called target audience, I think). You could get like 10 people on average every month that buy your product rather than a thousand visitors just visiting your site. So, which one is better?

Now I just wanted to let people know about this. Well think of it like the basic concept behind SEO. Okay I’m not going to tell you how you could get a good quality of traffic. You know the answer already, but all this time you probably were thinking about getting lots and lots of traffic. I suggest that you look for quality, not quantity when you really want a successful site and not just a site with tons of visitors.

Okay making your WordPress powered blog search engine optimized can be easy and effective. Just a few plugins, tips and tricks can get it to appear on search engines faster than usual. A site running on any kind of software is actually a bit more difficult to make it search engine optimized unless that software was made while keeping SEO in mind.

WordPress does give you the ability to customize your permalink which is good if you want to make sure that your visitors can remember it. But you need to do a little more than that to make your WordPress powered blog search engine optimized. I would first suggest that you install a plugin called All in One SEO Pack which optimizes your titles for search engines, adds meta tags, etc. It really makes your blog search engine friendly.

Search engines like Google lets you give XML sitemaps to them. A sitemap helps search engines navigate through a site and index it. So, I would suggest that you install this plugin called Google XML Sitemaps which automatically creates sitemaps of your blog. Another thing that would help is FeedBurner which notifies search engines when you post and it even has some great features like tracking your subscribers, letting you add social bookmarking buttons, making your RSS more compatible, etc. You would also need to install a plugin named FeedBurner FeedSmith which is needed to work with FeedBurner.

Those are just one of the great ways you can make your WordPress powered blog search engine optimized and one little secret is that Google loves blogs. I’m telling this because I’ve noticed that if you have a search engine optimized blog and your posts get indexed few minutes after you have published it while it takes days, weeks or even months for a site to appear on Google.

You might have heard of the term SEO and if you are a web developer or you are just into technology and the web then you should probably learn about SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of increasing traffic to a site from search engines.

Confused how it works? For example, you sell herbal shampoo on your site and like everyone else you would want to get more customers. But, you can only get a certain amount of people to know about your site. And you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on advertising your site. So, how do you get more visitors? It’s simple, when someone is interested in buying herbal shampoo, but he/she doesn’t know about a company or site that sells them, they would probably use a search engine like Google to search and find one.

People wouldn’t want to waste their time looking through all the search results. So, you would want to make sure that your site comes up at the top of the search result and like that the searcher would visit your site first. This is how you could get more visitors and some might actually be interested in your herbal shampoo and order a few of them. But, it’s not so easy to show up on top of all search results related to your range of products. There would be other sites that would also want to be on top.

How could you make sure that your site appears on top? Well it depends on which search engine you are targeting. But, the basic trick would be to make your site search engine friendly by using meta data, making sure that your site’s other pages can be easily accessed from the home-page and having valid codings.

Well the things I mentioned above are only the basic. There is a lot of other tricks and technologies for SEO, but there is also organic or natural and black hat or spamdexing SEO. Black hat SEO could get you on top of search results easily and maybe faster, but your site will get banned from the search engines at some point and may not appear on search engine results ever again. While organic SEO has no risks and will keep you on top for a longer period.

Today, thousands of sites are created daily and SEO could help you drive more traffic to your site. Then again SEO could be difficult and sometimes a risky process. Not everyone can get the skills.

Useful Links:

SEO Tips & Tricks – Check this out for some great discussion on SEO (from the basics to the advanced)