A blog is a website which is usually maintained by an individual with regular postings of content, descriptions of event information, or other information material such as photos, analytics or videos.
Optimize your blog
- Increase rankings of the blog on both regular search engines as well as blog/RSS search engines
- Increase traffic to the blog from multiple sources such as social search (Yahoo MyWeb, Google Personalized Search) and social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Digg, Furl or Blogmarks).
A blog is just a website that uses a content management system, so most standard SEO tactics apply. There are also optimization tactics specific to blogs.
- Add new content: If you consistently add new content to your blog you will attract regular readers and search engines.
- Optimize Your Content: Make sure you optimize the titles, paragraphs and links within your content. This means you must first do keyword research to incorporate keywords related to your content.
- Consider keywords: Some blog software allows plugins that can suggest keywords. Otherwise, you can use Google Suggest or Digital Point, SEO Book or Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
- Add Meta tags: The description meta tag is what visitors read about your site when they find it in the search engines. Make sure the description of your page will get the reader to click to your content.
- Optimize the template. Make sure post titles appear in the title tag and append the title tag (hard code) with the most important phrase for your blog. Also use the blog post title as the permalink.
- Optimize Categories. When you create categories for your blog, be sure to consider keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate.
- Social bookmarking sites can be excellent sources of traffic to your blog, so be sure to make it easy for readers to bookmark your blog posts. You can do this by adding some code to your blog template for each of the major social bookmarking sites.
- Create internal links: If you have related content from other areas of your blog create a text link (anchor text) within those posts to links your current content. Your post ranking will increase in proportion to the number of links pointing to it.
- Encourage commenting: Include questions within your content and encourage readers to leave a comment. This increases blog interactivity. Readers will see that it’s an active blog and will want to read the comments and provide their own feedback.
- Leave comments on other blogs: Find blogs that have content related to your own and write a comment that compliments their post or is in response to another other comments. With each comment include a link back to your own blog.
- Use trackbacks: A trackback is procedure for notifying the original blog poster that you have referred to their blog post in another blog. This will encourage those you trackback to, to do the same and will increase traffic to your site.
- Submit to blog directories: Also submit the blog to regular directories such as DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, MSN Business Central, etc) that have categories for blogs.
- Submit RSS Feed to RSS Directories: Make it easy for your blog readers to subscribe and include RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” in a side bar or on a dedicated Subscription Info page.
- Offer RSS to Email. Almost 30% of our blog traffic comes from readers that prefer to read blog posts via email. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz, Squeet, Zookoda, RMail and Bloglet.
