Search engine optimization for your blog
My friend Kimberly D. Wells recently asked this question in the Blogging for Business forum on Ryze:
Is anyone else finding that their Blog is getting heavy traffic from search engines? Any tips for Blog SEO?
A pretty good chunk of our traffic here comes from search engines. Here are some tips for optimizing your blog for search engines:
- Keyword research- What are the most popular terms around your topic? Use Overture and WordTracker for research.
- Keyword-rich category names - Text in hyperlinks gets preferential treatment. Category links are going to appear on every page, so they’re going to get a lot of exposure. Also make sure that there are hyperlinks to the category name(s) in each post of the category(ies) that the post is in.
- Hyperlink titles to the permalink - In plain English, that means make sure your headlines are linked to the permanent URL for that post. Blogger, by default, doesn’t do that — instead, the timestamp is the permalink. Wacky, useless convention. I have instructions on how to fix this here (see step 2). Warning - it’s pretty technical - probably going to be a challenge if you don’t know HTML.
- Use Trackback/pingback to notify other bloggers when you link to their blog. Some will automatically display a link back to your post.
- Put titles in an H2 or H3 tag - H2/H3 tags will score better than just big bold text created with CSS.
- Make sure each post can be its own page - If each post is on its own page, your keyword density (one of the criteria for search engine rankings) will be higher, since each post will talk about one fairly narrow topic. If all you have are weekly/monthly archives, and each post is a bookmark, you’ll have long pages with a variety of topics discussed, and your keyword density drops.
- Leave comments on other people’s blogs - Don’t spam them just to get a link. Contribute to the conversation. But you can usually put a link to your blog in when you leave a comment, and that helps build link popularity for your site.
An important note is that Blogger.com (and many other free services) really isn’t well-suited for much of the above. Most of the things I describe above that you do on your own blog either aren’t there by default (heading tags, hyperlinked titles) or aren’t supported at all (categories, single pages for each post). That’s why I generally recommend using WordPress or Movable Type on your own domain if you really want to get the maximum marketing benefit out of your blog.
For more on this topic, check out Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google
Thank you for the great advise. Perhaps you would like the idea of us posting or linking to some of your articles? Thanks again.
Comment by Chris — 1/12/2005 @ 3:33 pm
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Trackback by The Social Customer Manifesto — 1/13/2005 @ 7:33 pm
Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
If you want the search engines to not only find you, but also list you high enough that people will actually see and visit your site, you need to optimize it. Here is a great article to get you started.
Note: If you know you need to do this, but you…
Trackback by SteelerDirtFreak :: A 21st Century Missional Redneck Geek — 1/14/2005 @ 3:15 am
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Trackback by Threadwatch.org — 1/18/2005 @ 6:27 pm
Thanks for the great list. I love seeing all search engine referrals in the logs. :-) Also, cross-link your own posts. It helps search engines know about important links on your site.
Comment by Earle — 1/18/2005 @ 8:45 pm
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Pingback by Talismanic.co.za » Blog Archive » SEO for Blogs — 9/24/2005 @ 10:18 am
The most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is that “owner should have knowledge of his business first”. Once he knows what his target audience is, he can clearly choose keywords pertaining to his business arena. Choosing right keywords will surely help him to draw concentrated traffic towards his website.
Comment by Search Engine Optimization, SEO Services Company — 5/1/2006 @ 6:19 am
I’ve tried the WordTracker tool (Only for the trial period). As i see this, this is a great tool for getting english keywords. If anyone here speask other languages, I would reccommend using Overture.
Comment by Søkemotoroptimalisering — 10/31/2006 @ 11:40 am
I am looking for someone that can give me a hand with mod_rewrite for WordPress. Or any
tools or articles that someone may know of that can help me in SEOing my WordPress blog.
Please any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Comment by Justice — 12/12/2006 @ 4:39 pm
Nice info on SEO on this blog.
Comment by DaveG — 1/9/2007 @ 8:58 am
Good tips to make your blog more popular.
Comment by Mattg — 1/10/2007 @ 5:53 am
Do you think the domain name is as important for SEO as the title tag of a webpage? I know that MSN puts a lot of value on the domain name. But what about Google and Yahoo?
Thank you,
Robert McCulloch
http://rpmsol.info/
Comment by Robert McCulloch — 1/17/2007 @ 1:17 pm
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