Friday, January 8, 2010

SEO Tips for Birders- New Series!

Some of you may already know that I work in Search Engine Marketing. I shared a few tips when I met up with the BwBTC (Birders who Blog, Tweet, Chirp) group this past summer, but I thought it might be nice to reach out to the rest of my readers, and make it a regular occurrence. I'll be sharing one SEO tip, customized for bird bloggers, each Friday.

Some of you may be wondering, "What is SEO in the first place?" SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Other names for it are Natural Search or Organic Search. This is to differentiate it from Paid Search, also called PPC (pay per click) or SEM (search engine marketing).

SEO is the practice of crafting your content (in our case our bird blog posts) so that it shows up at the top of search engine results. And most importantly, so that you are showing up on the keyword phrases (things like "peregrine falcon pictures" "binocular buying tips," etc.) that you want to be found on.

The first tip I want to share is also the most important! I thought I'd start with the good stuff first to entice you :)

SEO Tip for Birders: Put the most important words at the beginning of your blog post title.

Why? Search engines will consider this your "primary" keyword phrase and therefore; the main topic of your blog post. It will appear in the URL of your blog post, which is crucial to showing at the top of search engine results.

Take a look at some of my blog posts for examples of how this is done. You'll notice that I'll often lead with the bird species name or the topic that I want to be found on in my blog post titles. You'll also notice when you hover over my blog post links the primary keyword phrase appears in the URL.

Stay tuned for my next tip, which will be about choosing the right words and phrases to target in your bird blog posts.

11 comments:

MaineBirder said...

This is a great idea! Thank you for sharing this info!

Birdinggirl said...

@John- thanks! I want to make sure that my bird blogging friends' pages are being found! So many of the people I connect with have great photographs and rare species that other people should know about.

Out walking the dog said...

Thanks so much for this. Very nice.

Andy said...

Great tip!

Birdinggirl said...

@Out walking the dog- glad to hear you found it helpful.

@Andy- Glad you liked this one. Your pictures are so good- you should definitely try SEO techniques to make sure even more people can find them.

Dawn Fine said...

Cathleen..
I am passing on this info to Gunnar who is doing a Social media Series..I think it would be useful to the series..
great stuff..
thanks.

Dawn Fine said...

oh here is his link
http://www.kolibriexpeditions.com/birdingperu/blog/index.php/day-3-social-media-for-birders-facebook-pages/

#FeedtheBirds said...

This is very helpful information. I knew this was important but didn't realize all the tools that were available. Thank you.

Birdinggirl said...

@Dawn- thanks for sharing! I did notice Gunnar's announcement about his social media series via Facebook. And I've been meaning to link to it but kept forgetting. I'll probably direct my readers to it again when my SEO tips overlap with social media practices (actually anticipate my next SEO Tip for Birders will- it's about external linking).

@WildBirdsUnlimited- thank you for stopping by! It's amazing how many free tools and information are available on the Web. Let me know if you ever have questions.

SEO said...

Blogger clearly isn’t as flexible as WordPress, but I don’t think all the points in the article are valid. Today a client of mine decided they wanted a news page on their site. I pointed them at Blogger, and 10 minutes later they had a news page linked from their site. That’s pretty useful in my opinion.

best seo said...

It is a shame that there are so many scams and cons on the web. I am sure you have saved a lot of people form being scammed.