SEO Your Blog

Blogs provide several tools to help bring traffic to your website fast. Have blog, will get traffic. That is, if you keep adding quality content to it and you know how to use those tools. Last month, we discussed blogging for business: advantages and disadvantages of having a business blog, what to write about, and how to start one. Now that we know how and why to get a blog going, let’s look at how to apply search engine optimization techniques to it. These techniques will also work to help optimize personal blogs for search engines.

Blog SEO and RSS

RSS is perhaps the best feature that blogs offer for SEO. If you’ve selected the option for it to do so, your blog program automatically notifies (pings) site update notification services whenever you add new content to your blog.

Your blog program is probably already set up to ping at least one site update notification service each time you post. This RSS submission page has a list of sites where people can submit RSS feeds. Some are for general blog submissions, while others are for specific content areas such as finance and news. When these services have your RSS feed, your latest content is indexed and appears almost right away at their sites. And it takes only a few days to appear in search engine results.

In addition, people can subscribe to your blog RSS feed and have blog updates sent directly to them.

Blog programs typically have the option to show the full article or just a summary (or the beginning) to syndication feeds. If you choose the latter, readers will have to come to your site to read the whole article. You’ll then know how many people are reading your content, and you’ll have those people at your site.

Blog SEO and URLs

Your blog program probably has different options for how to format URLs. Which format do you think search engine bots would give more weight to? Which ones would people remember better?

• example.com/2006/11/21/135
• example.com/2006/11/21/title-keywords/
• example.com/title-keywords
• example.com/archives/135

There may be more options, but the principles are the same. Most of the time, numbers won’t be recognized or remembered. Titles and keywords, on the other hand, have meaning for both humans and bots.

Most importantly, make sure that the URLs can be crawled. Avoid unnecessary characters when possible.

SEO and blog categories

Your blog post categories can work for bots as well as for people. Use keywords in the category names — these names are link anchor text. And, like other site menus, they appear on every page. Keywords also make their content clearer for people, and clearer content organization aids in site usability.

Blog linking and trackbacks

Blogs can be set up to show trackbacks, which links from one blog post to another. Enter the trackback URL for the other blog entry in the field for it when you publish your post, and your blog will send a notification to the other blog about the post you posted. Trackbacks often appear in the Comments section after posts, giving you an inbound link to your site.

You can also post comments in other people’s blogs with your name hyperlinked to your blog. Some blog owners have a “nofollow” meta tag to reduce the impact of spammers. Not all do, though, and if your contributions are of good quality, some people will follow those links and perhaps subscribe to your RSS feed.

With both of the above, be sure to only send trackbacks and post comments that are relevant and useful for readers of the other blogs. Those blog owners and readers don’t want spam any more than you do.

SEO and blog templates and plugins

Plugins created for blog programs can help with SEO. Some examples:

• This list describes and links to the best SEO plugins for WordPress, including SEO title tag, related entries, and Google sitemaps.
• This article on MovableType SEO covers how to modify MovableType templates for SEO. It also mentions dashify, a plugin that creates URLs with dashes between keywords.
• This link takes you to the b2Evolution forum where you can download an easy-to-use plugin for your blog. The plugin allows you to specify unique meta tags for your b2Evolution blog entries, which will greatly increase your chances of getting your posts indexed in Google.

Non-blog SEO for blogs

Search optimization steps to take with non-blog websites also work with blogs:

• Use keywords in your titles and headings as well as throughout the content.
• Use keywords in alt tags for images.
• Study your stats to see which keywords and posts are the most popular with bots and people. Use that information to plan new content.
• Add new content regularly.
• Link to related content at the site using keywords in the anchor text.
• Acquire inbound links.

You can look for inbound links the same ways that you’d work to acquire them for other sites. In addition, you can submit your blog to blog directories. DMOZ has a compilation of blog directories, and a search for “blog directory” brings up more results.