BirdingGirl

Some of you may have noticed this box at the bottom of my site (scroll all the way down to see the real thing): It's an embedded topic-finding tool from my company, WordStream . This tool that I helped develop is very useful when choosing a bird blogging topic. It's free to use, and if you want to send yourself a spreadsheet of the topics (called "niches") and keywords to include in your blog posts, just enter your email address to have them emailed to you. Here's an example of how you might use the tool: Let's say I have some pictures of a Great Blue Heron eating a fish (which I do- I'm going to post that next). I type "great blue heron" into the query box and click "Find Profitable Niches." This is what I see: I can see that "great blue heron eat" is a popular niche topic to write about since it's near the top of the list. I just click on the niche to see the keywords associated with it. Since I have pictures of a Great ...

This week's SEO tip for Birders (image optimization) is an important one since most bird bloggers like to post pictures of their sightings. Many of you have noticed that when you search on a bird species there are image results blended in with the rest of your search engine results. Example of bird species image results: SEO Tip for Birders : Optimize your images for bird species names. Bird Blogger Image Optimization Tips: • Always use the species name in your image file name - do this when you are reviewing and editing your digital images for your blog post. To rename a file simply right-click on it in the folder and choose "Rename." If you have multiple images of the same species use a - (hyphen) or a _ (underscore) to add a numeral to the end. For example: female+common+yellowthroat.bmp and female+common+yellowthroat_2.bmp If you are unsure of the exact species name then get as close as possible- "sparrow.jpg" Every little bit helps when it comes to SEO! •I...

In my last post I covered the titles of your blog posts and how you should include the most important words at the beginning of your titles. However, I didn't mention how to determine what the most important words should be. That brings us to my next SEO Tip for Birders- keyword research. SEO Tip for Birders : When doing keyword research identify words that a lot of people are searching for, but that you also have a chance of showing up on- it's a fine balance. There are many ways to generate ideas for your primary keyword phrase (the word/phrase you want to put at the beginning of your blog post title, and include in the body of your post), and your secondary keyword phrases (related terms that should be sprinkled throughout your blog post). Here are just a few ways to generate ideas for your targeted keyword phrases: 1. Your content : If you have a picture of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker then by all means choose it as your primary keyword phrase! In addition to the names of rar...

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 sh...