If you’re new to blogging or Search Engine Optimization, you’ll soon discover some fundamental truths:

• it requires patience and a lot of experimentation
• it’s difficult to test and measure effectively
• it’s very time consuming

Though I’m not a guru by any means, I have learned a few tricks about improving SEO that may help you get started with a little greater understanding than I started with.

Utilize the tools available

Improving search engine optimization could be as simple as adding a plugin such as the All In One SEO Pack to your WordPress installation. With it, you can add a title and keywords to individual posts from within the Write Post panel. You can also tailor meta information regarding your site overall, such as title, description and keywords.

Use appropriate tags

Tagging and categorizing is more than just a means of organizing your content. Other than providing a navigation system or filter mechanism for your visitors, it’s a way of signaling the bots that crawl your site. Useful category names and using tags that relate to your content will help you make friends with the SEs.

Make small changes

The search engines are very secretive about their indexing frequencies, and pinpointing an exact schedule is impossible. We may never know exactly when they crawl our sites, but we can exert some control by making measurable changes to things like ad arrangements, keywords, or product presentations. In other words, don’t change everything all at once, because then you’ll have no frame of reference for which changes are effective.

Track your efforts

Get your hands on a good tool for monitoring and analyzing your stats (incoming traffic, clicks, exiting traffic, etc). Knowing where your traffic is coming from, where it’s going and how people are interacting with your content will help you determine which keywords are performing, which ones might need tweaked and which ones people are searching to search your site. Google Analytics and pMetrics both provide free stats software.

This was intended to be a very brief guide to starting out with SEO. For some fast and easy tips on optimizing your blog, see my article 5 Simple Steps for Improving SEO.