One online marketing strategy that I’m passionate about is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I read dozens of fashion related blogs every week and it hurts me to seeing people making very basic and common mistakes. So here is are my five tips that any fashion blogger, writer or brand can implement themselves (no need for a pro) to make their content more search engine friendly and achieve higher rankings.

1. Categories — When you publish a post, only add that post to one category. Categories are not the same as tags; putting a post in more than one category creates duplicate content and search engines will think you wrote the same entry two, three or four times.
2. Tags – Tags are fantastic, the are descriptive words and phrases that describe your content. You can use as many tags as you like. Always use names, places, events, etc. relevant to what your writing about. So when you publish your post, it will most likely cross reference with the people you named, the events or places you wrote about.   Example: When I wrote “The Piperlime Experience,” my post tagged “Piperlime” and I wrote my permalink structure, page title and description in a way that were relevant to what I wrote about; Piperlime’s monitoring service left me a lovely note too.
3. Permalink Structure – A permalink is a URL that links to a specific blog post; permalinks can be altered changed and updated. If your are using Wordpress, (which I highly recommend that every do) the initial permalink reads: http://www.blogname.com/=p?123. This is wrong; crawlers don’t read beyond the question mark (?). You must change the structure under  SETTINGS in order for your permalink read correctly. There are few ways to do that, but it should look like something like this: http://www.blogname.com/2009/03/my-blog-post-title. Then the entire entry can be read. Tip: Your permalink doesn’t have to match the title of the post, alter your permalinks to include phrases or topics you are trying to rank for.
4. Page Title– Your post titles should be 60 characters or less. Titles should be descriptive and tight. Titles can be long, but wording beyond 60 characters is dropped.
5. Description — Keep descriptions to 160 characters or less. Make sure your title key words or phrases are repeated in your description. It will help your article rank better in search engines.

Please note: there are many reasons fashion brands need to hire professional  SEO services, I will explain them at a later. I will also explain the use of keywords on static web pages. This post is strictly related to writing blog posts.

Popularity: 9% [?]