Posts Tagged ‘blog seo’

How to Optimize Your Blog

January 18th, 2010 by Megan Homan

There are new blogs popping up on the Internet on a regular basis, but their ability to rank well is compromised as they compete with fully optimized websites for those top spots. Whether it is a personal blog about those precious tots or a business blog that showcases expert ramblings, it needs to be optimized. Blog optimization is not only important from a search engine viewpoint but your readers’ as well. Optimizing a blog is a little different than the standard SEO practices applied to actual websites, although they do share a common denominator – driving visitors to your site. The following are some blog SEO tips on how to help make your blog the very best it can be:

Beware of Design Template Disasters - Just like with websites, design counts! When deciding a layout for your blog, it is a good idea to design your own or have one designed for you. This will allow you to have more creative freedom and add some unique appeal to your blog. You can always choose a standard layout, but be sure to add some special tweaks to make it your own. When it comes to optimizing your blog for the search engines and readers, be careful of pre-designed page limitations.

Optimize Blog Post URLs - When you create a new blog post it typically looks something like this: www.yourblog.com/?p=890. Instead, you should incorporate the name or theme of your new post into your URL like www.yourblog.com/searched_keywords_work_best. This approach will definitely help get your blog post into the search results, especially if you incorporate searched keyword phrases into the URL.

Good Titles Make a Big Difference - Titles are extremely important to the search engine spiders visiting your page. Your titles, just like your content, need to be optimized. Incorporating keyword phrases into your titles will help your posts get better recognition in the search engines. Don’t waste title space optimization opportunities. For example, if you incorporate your blog name into the title, it’s better to get straight to the point with what that page is about. Search engines may view your posts as repetitious if you have the same phrase appearing in every title on your site.

The More You Have to Say the Better - If you want the search engine spiders to like what they see when they visit your site, be sure to post often. Google spiders, for example, love to see new content. The more often you post, the more often the spiders will visit, thus helping to increase credibility as you move up in the search results. Also, be original. Google hates to see duplicate content.

Beware of Spammy Links in your Comments Section - Google keeps a watchful eye on links. As a good rule of thumb, for any SEO strategy, you never want to have too many outbound links from your site, and you certainly don’t want links that are irrelevant to your post’s theme. Spammers use the comments section on a blog to boost their sites’ popularity, so you want to be sure that you are regularly monitoring the comments being posted to your blog.

Create Exposure through Links - You can use links to gain exposure for your blog without being spammy. If you reference an article or another blogger’s point of view, go ahead and link to it. This lets those receiving your link know you’re out there – and can result in you acquiring a link to your site.

If you require help with your blog search engine optimization, you can contact Web.com Search Agency at 1-877-726-5321 for assistance. Our team has the SEO expertise to move your website or blog to the top of the search results.

Need More Visitors For Your Blog?

August 3rd, 2009 by Patrick Hare

Lots of people use blogs to make business connections, get work, or make extra money. A recent CNN article even encourages client-seeking freelancers and other professionals to blog. As many seasoned bloggers already know, getting the blog set up is only half the battle. You have to have interesting topics, maintaining a blog takes up a certain amount of time, and you have to get visitors.

This is where the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques can help you. Most SEO customers are B2B or B2C companies that make money selling products or services online. Based on the competitive nature of e-commerce and lead generation efforts, SEO for these companies can be expensive and time consuming. For the solitary business professional, however, several small scale SEO practices can be undertaken which may get you enough traffic to your site (or blog) to keep the money coming in.

Here are some hints for getting more visitors to your blog with SEO techniques.

  1. Think Local. Most business professionals and freelancers will be working out of a certain geographical area. If you’re using your local city name in your blog posts, you are going to get classified in search engines for those phrases. If you leave out regional terms, you are effectively competing with everyone in the world who does what you do.
  2. Become a subject matter expert. If you practice a specific field of copyright law, or do marketing consulting for beverage companies, you definitely want to talk about those topics in your blog. If there are aspects of your work that are common to many customers, blogging about it will get you visitors who have the same issues.
  3. Find out what people are looking for. The Google Keyword tool can help you find blog topics related to your profession. Even if there are only a few hundred searches a month for your trade, one click can create thousands of dollars in new business, depending on your field.
  4. Build keywords into your titles. Most blog platforms like Blogger and Wordpress will show your blog title as the title of your posting page. Titles are very important in the world of SEO, and can be the difference between getting found on the first page of Google. Over 80% of searchers don’t even bother to get to the next page of results, so good titles are important.
  5. Get other people to link to your site. Search engines like Google value links from other sites as endorsements. You can start by getting links from fellow bloggers, but if you can get links from news sources you will be considered more credible.
  6. Use social media. For every new blog post, you can submit yourself to social media outlets like Digg. Sometimes the summary of your post on Digg will hit the search engines in a few hours, even if your own site doesn’t get ranked. You can use Twitter to let your followers know that you’ve done another post, and Facebook to link to it as well.
  7. If all else fails, buy paid traffic. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter (for Bing) all sell sponsored search packages, and there is no minimum spend per day. If you’re a freelancer with a niche service, your ad may show up among a small group of other ads, which is cheaper than being found for high demand terms.

There are also plenty of SEO tools you can use to find out where you rank in the search engines. As a word of warning, it can take several months to get your blog into competitive positions in the search engines, so getting started right away is generally the best course of action. As you develop you blog, you will be able to master techniques that can “ping” other networks every time you post, but the real key to getting found involves having plenty of fresh material. As you build an audience for your subject matter, you may find that word-of-mouth referrals take over for your SEO, but having a good groundwork will get you out in front of the free traffic that is looking for your unique abilities.