15 Tips to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engine Optimization

December 13, 2008

Blog SEO is one of the most effective way to build automated traffic to your blog. You might have learn some basic SEO strategy, but have you heard that blog has a very different way that allows you to get your blog on the first page very quick and easy.

Most blogger will rush to build backlinks, but they will discover ranking is hard and struggling because they have forgotten to do some “On-Blog Optimization” that would help them to get to the first page few times quicker. These On-Blog Optimization are:

1. Use Domain Name That Contain Keywords

Domain name gives you a huge advantage to get to the first page on the search engines. I’ve seen websites that have only few links that rank higher than sites which have hundreds of backlinks. The difference is just these sites domain name contain their keywords. This makes the search engine thinks that the domain name is dedicated to show only contents about the keyword.

2. Does Your Blog Title Contain Keywords?

Type keywords in your blog title. When the blog title is your keywords, the h1 tag and title tag on your blog will become your keywords. Each page of your blog will link back to the main page of your blog with the keywords too. All of these gives you extra SEO benefits to your blog.

3. Does Your Tagline Contain Keywords?

Every WordPress blog’s general setting, you’ll realize something below your blog title called ‘Tagline’ or description in other blog platform. Tagline is another important location to type your keywords. Make sure get it done.

4. Do You Miss Out Ping?

Ping is a important function of each wordpress blog will have. Everytime you publish a new article, your blog will ping itself to inform few websites you’ve created new information on your blog. Ping also helps to inform search engines you updated new information on your blog. Search engines like websites and blogs that update themselves frequently because they offer their users up-to-date and quality information. Search engine will usually rank your blog high if you ping often. Remember to import more ping services in your setting.

5. Are You Using Duplicated Contents?

Beware of duplicated content on your blog. Try not to reuse your own or others’ content on your blog. Reusing same content doesn’t help in ranking because search engines don’t index many pages that contain the same content because it might annoy their users and it might be a way to avoid spammers to increase their page by duplicating same contents.

6. Applying The Technique Of Keyword Density

Do you mention your keywords in your blog? Repeat your keywords often. Try to keep your density of keywords above 2% and below 7%. It means you got to have keyword you aim for 3 to 6 times in every 100 words you wrote. The more often you use the keywords in your post, the more the search engines thinking your blog is relevant to the keywords. Many people already aware of this method, this makes some internet marketer stuff keywords in their page. Google penalize page that overuse this method. Try to keep it below 7%.

7. Relevant Keywords

Since many people discover the keyword density method, Search engines have created a different algorithm that can judge websites’ content by the amount of relevant keywords. If you are using Wordtracker or Google Keyword Tool, these tool is able to give you many other keywords that are related to the keywords you aim for. Use some of them in your articles too. For example, you’ll see “pimple” and “blackhead” as related keywords when you search for acne.

8. Speed Blogging

If you post a new articleon your blog 3 times a day on your blog or more, Google think that your blog have the latest news about a topic and always provide fresh contents. As a result, you’ll rank easier. If you have a new blog, start posting once every 3 days and increase your post to once a day after 1 month. If your blog has been there for certain period, it’s up to you.

9. Page Volume

Another tip many Black Hat SEO trick users know is increasing the vloume of webpages. However, we try to do it in a white hat approach by posting more new articles. The more pages your blog has, the more content rich and informational the search engines think your blog is. As a result, your blog will be ranked higher.

10. Is Your Page Long Enough?

Publish posts have contain more than 250 words to get your page indexed quicker and stay in Google longer. As I mentioned, there’re many spammers who use the technique of increasing blog page quantity to manipulate search results. They might simply use a few words to publish a page. Search engines have ways to calculate the words to ensure it doesn’t happen.

11. What Sites Are You Linking To?

Do you know that your blog will get lower ranking if you link to a spam site or bad site? It is the same the other way round. If you link to a high authority site, your blog will have a higher ranking too. I haven’t did any experiment to prove it yet but I am a strong believer of this concept.

12. Interlinking

Is your blog posts linking to each other? Interlinking is a tip many internet marketers apply to increase Blog SEO traffic from keywords you don’t aim for. Although backlinks from the same site is not as good as backlinks from other websites, they are useful in ranking too especially you are able to have it done automatically with blogs. Use “Similar Post” plugin and create links to your popular posts at your sidebar.

13. Change Title Tags On Each Of Your Posts

Another tip to get more search engine traffic from untargeted keywords, it’s crucial to have the title tags of each of your blog post start with the post title first. You can use a free plugin called “All In One SEO Pack Plugin” that will do this automatically.

14. Create SEO Friendly URLs

The url of each of your blog post will not contain any keywords which people would search in the search engines in it by defaul. It might be something such as http://your-blog.com/?p=123. To make each of your blog posts more seo friendly, it is important to change your blog’s url to keywords. You can go to the blog’s settings and customize the permalink into “/%category%/%postname%”. This permalink structure will turn change the url of your post into urls that have the words in your post title.

15. Does Your Blog Has A Map?

Having a sitemap on your blog will definitely help you to rank faster because robot bots from Google could only crawl certain amounts of links. If your blog has a good sitemap that allows the bots to crawl your blog easily, more pages will get indexed and continue to get a lot of traffic from the search engine. But creating your own sitemap requires

Alex Liu is a full time blogger who specialize in Blog SEO to increase blog traffic. He shares tips and strategies to get traffic to blog at his blog-http://blogtrafficgeek.com

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Business Networking And Blog Courtesy-working On A Professional Link Campaign For Blog SEO

December 10, 2008

Business is all about networking, right? Plus, you likely know that you need to get some links to your website to build traffic. Since you’re a pro blogger, of course the first place you look for those much needed links is the blogosphere.

However, some manners are in order when it comes to posting comments and linking to your blog from other blogs.

It comes down to common courtesy. We’ve all heard the ‘golden rule’, right? Do unto others and all that jazz? The goal is for us to get a much needed backlink to our website, that’s true. But that’s not all we want. Spammy backlinks can be obtained pretty easily. There’s even software out there that will blast your links to a million different blog posts comment areas. But it’s not really what we want or need.

I’ll tell you one reason why.

Before even thinking about the other guy’s blog, and common courtesy, let’s consider your overall professional appearance. Think of your backlink campaign as one big press release for a minute. If you were blasting a press release to the major news networks today, you would want to present a super professional appearance right? You would want the world to see you as the undisputed expert in your field, professional, classy, the very best. Right?

Then why would you use a different approach and spam your link across the blogosphere? Making you and your website (translate: your company) look cheesy and unprofessional? If you knew that was the way the world perceived you and your business, you probably would have thought twice about it before you used a link blaster and posted your link to a million spam blogs. The problem is that many businesses and many bloggers don’t think the internet is part of ‘the real world’. They don’t stop and think about the fact that their actions on the web can have the same negative impact that they would have in the real world when it comes to cheesy and sleezy promotion tactics.

Nope, the internet is different in their eyes. They only know they need a bunch of links. It’s not important to them to build an overall web persona. PR is not a concern. But it should be. Because the web is no different than any other advertising medium. People are people, and if they read crappy comments that make you and your company look bad, they are not going to do business with you.

Now, let’s also consider the other blogs out there and some basic manners. In the real world, that is the one that doesn’t have a keyboard attached to it, you need to have some etiquette when it comes to business networking, right?

For example, if you are a member of the local rotary club, you don’t walk into the meeting each week shouting, “Make $5,000 every day using my secret methods”!

Do you?

No. You network. You shake everyone’s hand and say hello. You get into conversations and have intelligent discussions. You add something to the group as a whole. When asked, you give your expert advice and opinions and you build new relationships that turn into new client relationships.

So why would you do it any differently online?

When working on links from other blogs and other business communities, have the same manners you would if you were in that rotary club meeting. Be a contributing part of the conversation. Get involved and work on your professional appearance at the same time. Post relevant comments to the current discussion. Don’t interrupt like a thirty second commercial break, changing the topic so that you can promote your new product or service. Stay on topic and contribute something useful.

It’s o.k. if you don’t agree with someone. Good debate can be good for business. Some people will agree with you and visit your site based on your professional opinions. But only if your argument is written professionally and with some class. Stay out of name calling sessions and stay away from labels. Don’t call anyone an idiot or a moron. In the end, you end up looking like one.

Your comments are mini press releases. They are little road signs showing how professional you are. Or how unprofessional you are. Your public appearance is up to you. So have some courtesy when posting your comments. It will make the difference when it comes to how successful your linking campaigns are.

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Got A Website – You Need Start Your Own Blog!

December 9, 2008

Is there really a compelling reason to start a blog when you could be spending your time working on your website? Is a blog really as effective a marketing tool as a traditional website? It all depends.

Whether or not you should start your own blog depends largely on the use to which you blog will be put. Many bloggers are blogging for strictly social reasons; other use their blogs for productive purpose; and some bloggers manage to combine socializing and being productive in a single blog.

If your intention in starting a blog is to socialize, you will be most successful by creating your blog at one of the high-traffic social networking sites like MySpace and opening it up for comments so that you can begin a dialog with your readers.

If you want a productive blog, on the other hand, asking yourself why you should start your own blog takes on added importance, because anyone maintaining a productive blog will have to make a commitment of time if he or she expects the blog to succeed.

If you are considering a productive blog, you would do well to steer clear of the social networking arena and set yourself up on one of the blog hosting sites like WordPress or Blogger. When you have your blog up and running, you’ll no longer need to ask yourself “Why start your own blog when you have an existing website?”

One time consuming aspect of maintaining a blog is that of monitoring the comments posted by your blog’s readers. While those fresh contents can keep your blog in the of search engines’ radar, you could end up with some less than desirable blog posts and even get caught in the middle of battles between your viewers.

Blog comments are also often abused by spammers who simply want to plug their own websites, blogs, or pet causes. And if you have to spend a great amount of time refereeing warring readers, you’ll have that much less time to attend to the marketing aspects of your blog.

If you think you can manage it, create a blog which allows you to interact socially with your readers at the same time you are using it to increase your productivity. Why?

If you want to run with the big dogs in your industry, you will have to find some way of communicating to them that you are ready to do so. Being available to answer their questions on your blog is one way.

If you have a firmly held, defensible, but generally discounted belief regarding your products, leave a few challenging comments on related blogs, with links to you blog so that those who are interested can drop by to argue your point. When they arrive at your blog, lure them to your sales page.

Why start a blog when you already have a website? To socialize, to become more productive, or to become more productive by socializing. Blogs simply function in ways that websites were never meant to!

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Different Blog Platforms

December 5, 2008

blog seo
Seo Writter asked:


There are lots of different blog platforms out there. Some platforms are free and some are not of course, you need to pay for it.

The different blog platforms that I know are blogger.com, wordpress.org, wordpress.com, Movable type, LiveJournal, Bloglines, tripod, squareplace, and typepad.

As what I said, some of those platforms are free like blogger.com, wordpress.org and bloglines. Typepad and squareplace are some of the platform that need some money. It is up for the blogger which platforms are they going to use.

Most of the bloggers will choose to have their own domain rather than having your blog on a free hosted site. But, for those who don’t have that much budget they rather used the free platforms.

There are some factors that you need to consider when it comes in choosing the right blog platform for you. Through this factors you can answer lots of question that is in your mind.

First is, your Goals. As a blogger you need to know what is your main purpose. Do you see yourself blogging for a long period of time? Do you want to earn money through blogging or you just want to have fun writing different stuff? Those are some questions that you need to think about. Next is the Budget. Do you have enough budget to start a blog on your own domain or you will stick to those platforms that are free?. Finally, how technologically knowledgable are you when it comes to blogging? Do you have any backgrounds when it comes to blogging and designing a blog? I suggest choose the platforms where you are comfortable enough of using it. You need to have some knowledge when it comes to coding either HTML or CSS.

Blogger.com and WordPress.org are the two of the most popular blog platforms. Blogger.com has its different function that are easy to use while WordPress comes with the search function that are already installed. Just like blogger, wordpress also has thousands of template where a blogger can choose from.

There are lots to choose from just make sure you choose the right blog platforms that fits your needs and capabilities.

Those are some of the factors that a blogger should know before starting his/her blog. Enjoy blogging!



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