keywords

One year ago today, I wrote my first post on Motherhood, Marketing, and Medical Mayhem. I was inspired by the marketing insights gained at MarketingProfs Digital Mixer. I was especially excited because I won the conference pass and I couldn’t wait to share what I learned with the world. Now, a year later, I don’t know whether to consider this my blog’s birthday, anniversary, or what? Blogiversaryday?

No matter what you call it, I’ve learned a lot — and shared a lot — over the past year, not only on my blog, but via Twitter, guest posts, and comments on the blogs of others. All of the above are great ways to increase your search engine ranking. Generally, the more links you have coming in to your website from other reputable sites, the higher your natural search ranking. This is also known as off-page SEO (search engine optimization) or link building techniques. According to SEOMOZ, the quantity and quality of external links is the #2 top search engine ranking factor barely beaten out by keyword focused anchor text from external links.

As you might be able to guess, the flip side of off-page SEO is on-page SEO. On-page SEO includes things like keyword-rich URLs, installing 301 permanent redirects, ensuring unique URLs for specific webpages, and keyword optimization. With the exception of keyword content optimization, the other on-page SEO topics are fairly technical in nature but are explained nicely by Rand Fishkin in his post on Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.

As noted above, the final, and perhaps most important part of search engine optimization is keywords. Keywords are what a website wants the search engines to associate with their site. The idea is to find the most popular keywords for your audience with the least competition. To help you find keywords and traffic estimates you can use the Google keyword tool. Keywords are used both on-page in content, URLs, alt text, and meta descriptions, and off-page in anchor text.

In reading the details behind the SEOMOZ rankings, I found it interesting that Conferences, Events, and In-Person Networking was the 7th most effective link building tactic for SEO since that’s why I started my blog a year ago. So what do you think – is it a blog birthday, anniversary, blogiversary, or something else? Please leave a comment below or send some “Congratulations” flowers from my affiliate link to let me know!