by: Victoria Phee
Search engine optimization is the process done to generate traffic through
search engines. It became a need for websites because 80%-90% of visitors come
from major search engines. Higher rankings mean greater number of visitors. The
same concept applies to blogs. However, many blog owners are not aware of their
chances of being more visible on the web. They just update it once in a while
and that's it. Considering the great number of blogs on the net today, from
personal to corporate blogs, all their efforts will just go to waste if they do
not optimize it.
Yes, blogs can be optimized, too. It should be done for the benefit both of your
readers and search engine spiders. Although the process is quite similar with
the standard website search engine optimization, it is a bit different. Here are
some tips that you can do to start:
Consider the Design
It is not advisable to use the default template being offered by blog publishing
sites. You wouldn't want to bump into a girl in a party wearing the same dress,
do you? Same thing goes to blogs. You can hire a designer to do the work for
you. If running a tight budget, you can always look for free templates offered
by web design companies and you can customize it a little to make it unique.
Optimize the Tags
Use the most substantial phrase for your blog in the hard code of the title tag.
Also, you have to double check that each entry's title appears on the tile tag.
This is sometimes overlooked.
Keywords
You should always use your keywords in the blog post titles and categories. You
can also use many categories in one entry if appropriate.
RSS Feed
It is best that you have RSS subscription button available on your blog. This
would be more convenient to your readers because it will publish your recently
updated work. If your blog publisher don't have RSS automatically available,
there are RSS feed button creation tool on the net. But make sure that you place
it where the readers can easily see them. You can put it in your sidebar. It is
already on the blog owner's prerogative if he/she wants to full or partial RSS.
Use Email
Because there are some people who are not familiar with RSS feeds, go the extra
mile and offer them something else with the same benefits. I'm talking about You
can have your blog post via email. Free tools are also available online to do
this.
Compelling Introduction
Introduction about the blog post is sent out via RSS feed. Make sure that it is
compelling to enough to make your readers want to have more of it so that they
would click the “more” button and read the entire article. Therefore, it should
be interesting.
Check you CSS
It is common that blogs come with overwhelming amount of CSS or Cascading Style
Sheets. The solution to this is to place it in an external CSS file to avoid
clutter in the main template and for the main entry not to go further down.
Keywords-rich Anchor Texts
In placing links in other sites/blogs and even in putting internal links, make
sure that you are using keyword-rich anchor text. Remember that it is always
better to use your keywords than “click here” or “more”. It would benefit you
when search engine spiders crawl your blog.
Keep Your Posts Bonded
If your blog post is somehow connected to your previous posts, link them to each
other. The idea is that if your reader is interested in this particular topic,
then he/she probably can also be entertained of a different story with the same
subject matter. You can use Related Posts Plugin for this.
Do the same in other blogs. If you see a blog entry or an article on the same
issue, make them knowledgeable of your existence by placing a link going to your
post.
Purchase a Domain
We all know that blog hosting companies will only be around for such a time.
Once they close their business, they will be closing your blog as well. If that
happens, where will your loyal followers find you? Or there are change in the
domain of your blog host, it will surely affect your rankings.
In case you have limited resources and can only settle to free hosting
companies, look for those who offer to display your own domain rather than
displaying their own like Wordpress and Blogger.
Proper URL Naming Convention
It is always a bad idea to use dynamic URLs whether on websites or blogs. You
should always take advantage of any chance you have to use keywords, without
keyword stuffing, including this one. Meaning, instead of using
“www.xyzblog.com/?246”, you can consider “www.xyzblog.com/blog-post-keywords-here”.
When you cannot do anything about it, use mod rewrite.
Good Navigation
If your blog is just a part of a website, it is not ebough that you a have a
link going to your blog's main page. Use the sidebar to syndicate your new posts
because the visitors of the website might get interested in your articles if
they see the titles.
Fast Page Load
The amount of time involved for a page to load all depends on your host. There
are some blogs that takes about half a minute just from the snippet of RSS feed
to the full article. You can lose a lot of readers just because of this reason
alone.
Moderated Trackbacks and Comments
Spammers are everywhere. They always find a way to abuse your blog by putting
non-sense comments with links going to their website. It is annoying and it can
also affect your rankings. There are numerous tools available online which you
can use to moderate and avoid comment and trackbak spam.
Don't just create a blog to share great information or to prove that you know a
lot about the field you are into. Do not settle on the number of followers your
blog has. Start to optimize now and see the great changes on the next few
months.
About The Author
Victoria Phee is a contributor of Team Creatives ( http://www.teamcreatives.com
) - a Professional and Affordable Website Design and Web Development Company
that also offers professional SEO and pay per click management services
Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_4844.shtml
Tags:
Blog Optimization
- Blog -
Optimization |
