Susan Suarez

Applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques can be very time consuming and downright irritating.

To gain exposure without ripping your hair out, here are 10 ways to improve your search engine ranking that can be applied yourself.

1) Keywords. Each page of your site should contain a 300 word minimum with keyword rich content.

2) Write quality content. The better the content, the more likely you’ll receive inbound links from other sites. It’s best to receive inbound links from relevant sites so writing a friendly post about another blogger could create the possibility of having the favor reciprocated which can be beneficial to both.

3) Creating a themed site. Have your blog be an authority on a niched subject instead of a large range of themes. Covering too many niches can work against your site.

4) Interlink your site. Make sure that the search engine crawlers can flow through your site easily. To do this, make sure your category pages are in your sidebars so that means every page of your blog is just 1-2 links away from every other one.

5) Research Your Domain Name. Check to see if your domain name is seen in a negative or positive light prior to you purchasing it. To do that, visit the Way Back Machine to research expired domains.

6) Register Your Site For A Lengthy Time Period. Google checks the length of your domain registration when ranking the site.

7) Keep your posts focused. Providing one topic per post will be beneficial to when Search Engines rank it versus writing lengthy ‘articled’ styled posts that may encompass a lot of tangent topics.

8) Use Ping Services. Pingomatic is a good service to use to notify websites that you’ve updated your blog. You can set this up easy if you are already running Feedburner.

9) Use Permalinks Correctly. Don’t use permalinks that look like this www.yourblog.com/?p=205/ Instead you want to set your permalink to match the topic title such as www.yourblog.com/title_is_here. With wordpress, changing the permalink is easy. Go to Options, Choose Custom and then enter /%postname%/

10) Submit to Search Engines. Submit your url to be included in their indexes. It will usually take some time so you could try to speed the process up by linking to a site that has already been picked up by a search engine.

Eventually a search engine will pick up your blog or rank you higher, but why wait?