We all want a successful blog or website, but we may not be experts in the area. Decisions on what will make a site more search engine friendly never come if we don’t know the basics. Here are some search engine optimization tips that are easy to implement. Perhaps for some of you, your first seo lesson!

Many of us love to display tons of awards, pretty widgets and all kinds of fun things in our sidebars. The problem is, they are terrible for optimization and can make search-engines not like your site. The answer is, reducing the clutter on your site! Now don’t get mad at me for calling your beautiful set of awards “clutter”!

In wordpress, you can move them to a page in the tabs at the top of your site. On blogspot, you can do something similar if you are familiar with template modification and know html fairly well. If you aren’t confident in html, perhaps just moving some of them to a post will do quite well.

To find out if your site needs some cleaning up, go to Sitening.com and open an account. It’s free, and it’s a nice tool to use providing some easy to understand information. Once you’ve signed in, go to tools, seo analyzer. Simply enter the url of your site and see what score you get. I got a 75 my first go around which is not good. I moved several awards to a page and that almost fixed it.

You want your main page to be under 100 KB. Next, I removed the alt text from several widgets in my side bar. You don’t really need alt text and it’s fine to remove some. In the old days when lots of people used text only browsers (no images), the alt text is what they would see instead of images. I could care less if someone doesn’t see the alt text, they need to get a modern browser! I use text only browsers for certain things, but am not worried if the alt text isn’t there.

I ran the test again and scored a 90. Much, much better! I know it can be hard not displaying every award and best buddies site widgets in your side bar, but it will be good for your site.

For Blogger blogs: Here’s a nice little code you can put in your side-bar on blogger or any where else you want a link to your awards post to be:

<a href="http://yourposturl.com/">My Awards</a>
 

Just change the url to the post url of your awards post. This way, your awards will be easy to get to, especially if you are proud of them like me. If your site is 280 KB, I recommend you clean some of it up. Search engines are picky and they will love you for it!

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