SEO Basics for Mom Entrepreneurs and Bloggers

Are you scratching your head or running the other way when someone utters the words, “Search Engine Marketing”? Do you avoid approaching PR reps because your traffic numbers are low? Are you fudging the numbers to get invited to the next blogging event?

While I don’t think traffic should be the only deciding factor when choosing a blogger to represent a brand, there are ways to help increase your rankings.

One of the first things to keep in mind when it comes to search engine marketing is to determine what keywords you would like to rank for. For example, if you blog about your life as a work-at-home mom then “work at home mom” or some derivative should be part of your keyword marketing. If you want to promote yourself as a professional mom blogger, then those words need to be on your blog and they need to be used often.

Once your keywords are defined there are several things you can do to increase/improve your positioning for those keywords.

• Create unique and accurate page titles
  Page titles are the words you see at the top of browser whether it's Internet Explorer or Firefox. Be sure that your page titles are unique to your blog or website, utilize the keywords you would like to rank for.
• Make use of description meta tag
  The description meta tag is where you would right a brief description of your site. This description is what you see during a google search underneath your website's link. Remember to add your keywords here as well.
  

  

• Improve the structure of your URL’s
  For good SEO you should consider changing the structure of your url’s if you can.
  Here is an example of an online store with “junkie” URL’s.
  
  Here is an example of a search engine friendly URL.
  
  Note: Not all shopping carts allow you to edit your product URL’s. For LaLa Baby Boutique we use SearchFit. SearchFit allows you to customize your URL’s in order to make them more SEO friendly.
• Make your site easy to navigate
  In the site below notice the buttons on the left, I bet you didn’t know those were actually clickable and lead you into a more detailed list of categories.



• Write better alt text
  Alt texts are the actual words that you click on when you click a link to a page or hyperlinked text. If you are leaving out the anchor text, then you are missing out on an opportunity for more keyword placement. You can also add keywords and descriptions to your images buy adding an alt reference.
  
• Offer quality content
  Obviously it’s been said time and time again – content is king, but it’s also been said quality is more important then quantity. Try not to get wrapped up into creating the most posts in a day if you aren’t producing quality work.
• Use heading tags for titles
  When there is a title it should also be wrapped in a header tag, an h1 is preferred. Heading tags have different priority levels, H1 takes the highest priority. You don’t have to stick to the default style /size of titles, they can be stylized in CSS to your specifications.
• Optimize your images
  Take some time to optimize your images to slow down load time of your site. It’s best to save graphics as .png files and photographs work best as .jpg’s.
• Take advantage of site analyis tools like Google Analytics
  You can keep track of the stats of your blog with Wordpress plugins like StatPress, Ultimate Google Analytics, or CyStats.

  If you operate a store or static website be sure to implement Google analytics on to you site so you can record traffic trends, purchases, and much more. With Google Analytics you can also track some banner adss.

These are just a few tips to help get you started with SEO for your blog or business. To get more information check out the e-book 50 SEO Secrets for Mom Entrepreneurs.