Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
December 19, 2008
Optimizing a blog is just like optimizing any other website. The content and pages (posts) must be unique, they must be search engine friendly, and it needs links from other websites. If it’s a new blog, then you first need to make sure the blog software you’re using is set up so that it takes advantage of all of the possible optimization features. Then, announce it to the world, work on getting some links to it, and start making posts.
WordPress Optimization
If you’re using WordPress for your blog software, it’s important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly, meaning that it can easily be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. It’s important to set up your blog’s software so that the URLs don’t contain a lot of variables. Instead, use URLs that include the post title or post name in them. For example, if you’re using WordPress you’ll need to set the permalinks so that it uses %postname% in the URL. You can also set up a specific category for the post archives, and you might consider using a keyword that’s related to your blog instead of the default, which is typically the word “archive”. Fintan Darragh has a great blog post called “Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips”. Mr. Darragh talks about permalink optimization and says, “The goal: stick more keywords up into the URL and remove the faff which nobody uses, to make the URL search engine and people attractive. Having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.” He also goes on to talk about getting rid of useless tags like the month, day, and year, as well as one important detail: whatever you do stick with the site structure you choose—otherwise you might end up with a lot of useless links to your site. Other tips that Mr. Darragh mentions are optimizing your page titles and your post titles–and installing a few plugins that are useful such as the “Related Posts Plugin” and the “Technorati Tag Generator”.
There are several other places where you can get specific tips about setting up WordPress in a search engine friendly manner, including: * SEO at Aleeya Dot Net.
DYI Search Engine Optimization, One of the best tutorials out there is one called “DYI Search Engine Optimization” by Lorelle VanFossen. Specifically, Lorelle (lorelle.WordPress.com) has some great tips, including how to optimize your code, develop strong intrasite links, write with strong keyword usage, use categories and tags, and how to use ping services. Lorelle says that “the goal is to help search engine crawlers move through your website collecting information to be stored in the search engine’s database. The key to your blog’s data making it successfully into a search engine’s database is to: 1) Make sure there are no road blocks in the path of a search engine crawler.
2) Make sure the crawler can move through your blog, examining all your web pages.
3) Provide adequate keywords and key phrases which clearly help categorize your content.
4) Provide clearly labeled tags and categories recognized by tagging service crawlers and many search engines today.
5) Take advantage of pinging services.” There are several WordPress Plugins available that will help you take advantage of internal linking (like the Related Posts Plugin) which will link to other posts in your blog that are on the same topic.
Other plugins that might be helpful are plugins that automatically generate a Google Sitemap file as well as plugins that help you categorize the site such as the WordPress Subdomain Plugin.
Movable Type Optimization
If you’re using Movable Type for your blog software, then it’s also important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly and can be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. Miles Evans says that “Movable Type is optimized quite well out of the box, but there are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some dynamic content.” He goes on to say that you need to optimize your template. “For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the template within the tag. You can get fancy on your index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site wide.” Mr. Evans also has another article titled, “Best Movable Type Plugins” that talks about his favorite plugins that help him get great search engine rankings. His favorite Movable Type Plugins for SEO are Dashify, MTPaginate, MT Blogroll, MT InlineEditor, MT-Textile, BigPAPI, as well as Ajaxify (a set of plugins that adds several ajax/javascript widgets into the Movable Type interface), CheckLinks, FormatList v1.0, and Better File Uploader for uploading files. Nicholas Carvan has a great article about Movable Type optimization called “Optimizing your Movable Type blog for Google”. In it he talks about PageRank (and how it relates to your internal linking on your blog), having keywords in your URL (which is important for all blog optimization) and blogrolling. He defines the term blogrolling very well, saying, “Blogrolling: Inbound links are gold, but in Google’s eyes, not all links are equal. In particular, Google isn’t wild about links contained within JavaScript – apparently they can index them, but that doesn’t mean they always want to.”
Once you’ve set up and configured your blog’s software, it’s important to make sure that you leave it alone—if you change your page URLs then any links that you’ve received from other bloggers may not be valid anymore. If you need to change your site’s structure (perhaps you’ve been blogging already and wish to use the tips from this article to optimize your blog), then you might want to take a look at the Objection Redirection WordPress Plugin if you’re using WordPress. The Objection Redirection Plugin gives you a simple interface to redirect users (and search engine bots) to the proper page, especially if you’ve changed your site’s structure.
Start Blogging
The best thing you can do is to start blogging. Go ahead and post to your heart’s content and write, write, write about your topic. The more content you can provide the better—and it seems as if adding content on a regular basis really helps, as well. Feel free to link out to other blog posts that are related to the topic you’re writing about. For example, before you publish a post, go on over to your favorite blog search engine and find another recent post on the same subject—and link to the post. Linking out to other bloggers will get their attention, and hopefully they’ll end up linking to you as well. If other bloggers have trackbacks turned on then their blog will link back to your post. Some trackbacks are moderated, so it might take some time before your link shows up on the other blog. And some bloggers have trackbacks turned off, so a link back to your site might take some manual intervention. Categorize your posts as much as possible, and feel free to add categories as you blog—it will help the internal linking structure of your site, and help the search engines and users find on-topic posts.
Promoting Your Blog
Whenever you make a post in your blog, your blog software will attempt to ping certain sites to let them know that you just updated your blog. There are many blog ping services out there, including Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. Your blog software can be configured to ping sites automatically, and I’ve posted a list for WordPress of ping services on by blog. If your blog is new or you would like to get some more links, you can submit your blog to blog directories as well as other sites that will list your blog (don’t forget to submit to DMOZ.org, Yahoo! Directory, and the Best of the Web Blog Directory). About.com has a great article about promoting a blog and even Biz Stone has great tutorial about promoting your blog. Lastly, don’t forget to turn on your blog’s RSS feed. And if you’re looking to promote your RSS feed, try searching your favorite search engine for “promote rss” to find a lot of good tutorials.
Promoting your blog is just like promoting a website you need good spiderable content, links to your content, and you need to set up your blog software to take advantage of all the great features. There are also plugins that will help make blogging easier for all of us.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Make Money With Your Blog
December 7, 2008
Someone asked on LinkedIn: “If I wanted to have a successful blog that potentially made money, what would I do?”
First thing’s first, after figuring out what it is you’re going to write about and designing the blog and hosting it somewhere (I would suggest purchasing a keyword-rich domain name rather than hosting it free on Blogger or some other blog site), the most valuable thing you can do is add buttons and links to your blog to allow users to subscribe to it in as many different ways as possible. Some people use services like Bloglines, some people use an RSS app, some people use Firefox live bookmarks, but not all of these people are savvy enough to know how to subscribe to a blog without a specific sub-to-this-blog link for their preferred RSS reader. A great resource to help you make these different links is Feedburner.com. Feedburner also allows you to design email signatures with animated headlines from your blog, and many other different ways to publicize and monetize your blog. Plus, it lets you watch the traffic and subscription trends for your blog’s feed.
Next, you want to research keywords to find a keyword that relates to your subject matter that people actually search for, so that if you find yourself in the top ten rankings on Google for said keyword, you will actually get traffic from it. An awesome tool to help you figure this out is Wordtracker GTrends which is here: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/
Once you find your keyword or key phrase, you want to make sure your blog’s code is search engine friendly. You want to make sure your meta tags are within search engine guidelines, that your keyword density is appropriate for your subject matter, and that all of your titles have your keyword or key phrase in it. A good way to get a head start on this is to have your blog’s backend hosted by Blogger, while the blog itself is published on your own domain. I say this because Google owns blogger and as such, the new version of blogger features extremely Google-friendly code.
After this, you need to get some links pointing to your site from good, Google recognized sites that relate to your subject matter. The best way to do this is to search on Google for your keywords or key phrase and ask the top ten ranking web sites to link to your blog. You may have to be creative about this, using what we like to call link bait. This can be anything that entices another web site owner to link to your site. Because your site will be new and most top ten ranking sites know a thing or two about search engine optimization, you probably won’t be able to just get a link exchange – no one wants to link to a brand new blog for two reasons, one is that new bloggers have a tendency to lose interest after a while and you find yourself linking to a blog that never gets updated, and two is because the site has no Google PageRank. If you offer your potential linkers something else, you may have more success. For example, I once ran a campaign for a client that swapped links for a discount on my client’s products. Whatever it is you swap for a link is up to you, be creative.
You want to add your web site to blog directories and blog resources such as Technorati. If you haven’t spent literally a week straight doing this, you haven’t found nearly all of them. There are so many! Your best bet is to search Google for a list of blog directories.
Ask your friends or colleagues to Digg each of your blog posts using digg.com
Add links to the bottom of every post that will allow readers to add to delicious, post to facebook, myspace, stumble upon, etc. Use as much 2.0 power as you possibly can. Get a Twitter account and tweet as much as you can, follow as many users as you can. Make sure every profile you’ve ever made for yourself or your business on any site, has a link to your blog. Make sure your blog address is everywhere, when you comment on others’ blogs, when you talk in forums, etc.
You want to make sure you have an advertising policy available on your web site for potential advertisers to read, and as many different ways for them to contact you.
When all of this is set up and ready, it’s time to send out a Press Release. Make sure it is enticing and boldly underlines how this blog is different and why people will want to read it. Submit your press release to as many press release distributors as possible. Again, just search on Google and you’ll find a ton. Some cost money, some are free.
Now it’s time to post. Make sure your posts have personality. No one wants to read a dry technical blog. You want to make sure your own personality comes out in each and every post. Also, the more controversy, the better. A controversial post will entice readers to send the link to their friends and family in either horror or pride – both are equally as good! It will also encourage comments and repeat visits when something heated has been posted to the comments and the poster wants to come back to check the responses. It will also encourage repeat commenters and some will be compelled to subscribe to your blog. Make it controversial enough and you may even hit the mainstream news, such as Michelle Malkin did recently when she objected to the scarf Rachael Ray was wearing in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad.
Submit all of your article length posts to article databases utilizing the author’s bio as a spot for a link back to your blog. Hopefully people will syndicate these on their own sites keeping the bio in tact and thus, creating more links to your blog.
Some people use traffic exchanges such as BlogExplosion or Blog Soldiers and while it does actually increase your traffic, most of that traffic is useless. The only one I have ever found that actually results in real readers, is BlogExplosion.com. These sites are not entirely useless, however, as they do have directories that your blog is submitted to when you join. And there are no obligations after joining, so I would suggest doing so just to get into the directories as they are even more links to your blog.
Make sure you blog regularly, but not too much. Many people subscribe to RSS feeds as a much faster way to get their daily reading in. Blogs with a lot of daily headlines, generally get skimmed and sometimes just deleted when there’s no time. But blogs that only have a post a week, can tend to be forgotten about. My suggestion is to keep it to once daily, and at the very least, 3 or 4 times per week. If you are going to be unable to post for a period of time, vacation or something, post and let your readers know so that they don’t think it’s just another blog gone stale.
In the meantime, add Google Adsense to your blog, perhaps Amazon a-store and any high-quality affiliate programs that can relate to your blog’s subject matter.
If you keep all of this up, you will have advertising revenue. The key though, is patience. Keep at it and don’t get discouraged. Publicizing any web site can take months upon months before you see results. But once you do, it’s highly worth it. You may even want to design and sell your own merchandise for further revenue.
