Basic SEO Tips for a Newly Launched Blog - Beginners Guide

Blogging is more than just about creating an online space for yourself and putting up content there. You have to be the best in order to compete with the best. But even becomes less important when it comes to optimizing your blog for search engines. After all, you want your great content to reach your potential readers, right? Otherwise, what's the point? This is the part where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. In this post, we'll take our beginner readers through the basic SEO process - things they should implement on their own blogs.

Google Webmaster tools

Google Webmaster Tools is your friend! Whether you like Google or not, you will have to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). GWT is basically a dashboard where you can not only get yourself verified as an official owner of your site, but also get access to a lot of tools, features, and reports. With GWT, you can change how Google sees your website, and even receive messages from Google regarding updates, and errors found on your website.

With GWT, you can;

• View Crawl Errors, Crawl Stats, Blocked URLs Index
• Fetch as Google - Pretty handy for fetching data for your website and submitting it to index to ensure that it's indexed more quickly.
• View search queries, and internal/external links
• Submitting sitemap (discussed below)
• ...and so much more.

Submitting Sitemap

The first thing to do after making a proper website or blog is to create a sitemap, and submit it to Google. A sitemap is basically a listing of the contents of your blog, sort of like a table of contents. It needs to be submitted to search engines so they know what content to find on your blog. We recommend that you put up some content first before creating and submitting a sitemap. A round 10 posts on your blog should be enough to get you started.

When you submit a sitemap, search engines use the data on that sitemap to locate your site and your data, and index it. You might have noticed that your site didn't appear on Google after you created it. Well, to get it into search results, Google first needs to index it. And to make Google index it soon, you submit a sitemap.

To submit a sitemap, you first need a sitemap generator. For Blogger blogs, you can use the tool on the following link.

• Blogger Sitemap Generator

If you're using WordPress, then you just need a plugin called "Google XML Sitemaps". Either way, it's a simple process and only takes a few simple instructions.

Keep monitoring your rank and statistics

Now that you're a blogger and have started generating good content, it's time you should start monitoring your success. Keep track of your Page Rank, which comes out every three months. The last one came in February this year. You should also keep a check on your Alexa Toolbar ranking. For monitoring your website statistics, you should use Google Analytics.

Basic SEO Tips

You might also like reading a couple SEO guides that come directly from Google.

• Download Google's latest cheat-sheet eBook to optimize your site

These basics tips and guides should get anyone started good with optimizing their website. If you still have questions, please feel free to ask in the comments section. And please, try to stay on-topic here. Thank you :)