I’m sure you have read many articles about search engine optimization for websites and portals. How about your own blog? Can you apply the conventional SEO techniques on your blog? The answer is “Yes”, you can.
Blog has become increasingly popular these days because of its flexibility and easy content management. Blogs and blog posts are generally search engine friendly because they are rich in text, links and unique information. And in general Blogs are known to the search engines as daily snippets of information that are updated on a regular basis, so they get a lot of priority in the search results.
So how can you better optimize your blog?
Well, optimizing a blog is similar to optimizing a website. But depending on what Blog service you use e.g. Blogspot, WordPress, typepad; the result and effectiveness may look somewhat different.
Below are some of the main to-do’s:
1. When setting up your blog, make sure your primary keyword is in the blog domain. No matter what blog service that you are using, this is a MUST.
For example if you want the searchers to find you by the keyword “Celebrity”, make sure it is inside your domain/sub domain.
2. Try to be focused on your topic and your blog theme. If your blog is technology oriented then only focus on the topics which are related to technology. Mixing up content doesn’t really help in SEO. The advantage of a blog comes from the frequency of the posting. If the search engines find similarities in a pattern of 3-4 postings per day, they will be very active on spidering that site. Depending on the topic of the blog, you may be able to boost up your blog in the rankings if it’s related to a hot topic on the web.
3. Always use interesting titles on your blog, which is sometimes known as ‘link baiting’. Your title should create an interest on the reader’s mind to read further on the topic.
4. Use tags to highlight and emphasize certain keywords.
5. Link to other popular related Blogs, and ask them to link back to yours.
6. If you are using wordpress, make sure you take full advantage of Permalinks. Use a nice structure with your post title on the link.
7. Use Google Sitemaps, which is a feature provided for webmasters by Google. Google sitemap is going to help you to index your blog well in google.
8. There’s no better food for search engine than fresh content and links. So update frequently and let everyone know by sending “Ping” to all the famous aggregators.
There are lots of other ways to optimize your blog for the search engines. But whatever you do make sure you stick with your current domain and blog service or system for as long as you continue to write. You could end up losing a lot of readers if you move somewhere else.
