10 Simple White Hat SEO Tips for Bloggers

These tips are derived from Matt Cutts blog, he's Software Engineer and a head of Google's Webspam team. In 2007 July 21 he attended WordCamp and made a presentation of how to build a good blog without using black hat seo technique. Here's his tips.

1. If you host your blog yourself, don't put it in the root directory of your domain. Instead create a specific folder (i.e. myblog) and develop your blog in it. This is because you might have to change your mind and decide to make something new in your blog like forum or other site. This also can provide more links because people will make 2 types of links: 1 for your domain and 1 for your blog.
2. Make categories from words which are good keywords itself. Instead "my tips" name it "blogging tips". In good SEO everything counts. Try to shape every corner of your blog.
3. Put keywords in URL paths. This is not only good SEO practise but also people who will come from Search Engines will see their keyword in the results page, so they will be more likely to visit your blog. Separate words in URLs only with dashes ("your-words"), underscores ("your_words") are less good solution and no spaces ("YourWords") are worst.!
4. When writing articles think about what keywords people will type and use those keywords several times but not too much.
5. Don't forget to put ALT tags on all images. People also search images and the only way to make them come to your blog is to provide relevant ALT tags. Use 3-4 words which best describes the picture.
6. Check how your blog looks on various platforms, don't forget there are mobile phone users (cell-phone/iPhone).
7. Provide users with FEED. Full-text rss feeds do better for loyal visitors.
8. Allways announce when you wrote a new article to the world by pinging. (my article about blog pings)
9. Track your visitors with Google Analytics, and place its code in footer.
10. And most important tip is how to get traffic to your blog. Most bloggers are solving dilemma what to do first "Get traffic from Google, then get noticed" or "Get noticed, then get traffic from Google". The answer is to get noticed first. What's the point to have much traffic only for people to see that your blog contains nothing? Try to be original because creativity creates buzz/word-of-mouth. Create your own tutorials, make analysis or reviews and traffic will increase itself.

These tips applies not only for blogs but also for all webpages. There are more advanced SEO tricks, but these are very simple to follow and costs you no money.