Cog SEO Blog

Posted By Melanie Prough on April 22, 2009

Blogging has become such a widespread means of establishing a web presence, and it continues to grow in numbers everyday. I have felt for some time, that people who hadn’t yet developed the designing and coding skills necessary to publish their own websites, probably still had incredible content to add to the Internet. Blogs have brought personalized, intelligent, humorous, unique, and in many cases expert source-able content to the end users. Blogs eliminated the middle man. Now papers can be published, and families can keep other family members up to date day by day in life events. This is one kind of Blogger, recreational Blogger.

The second kind of Blogger, whether for profit or not, is a professional Blogger. This type of Blogger is trying to accomplish some professional goal with a Blog. Whether it be expert status in his/her field, monetary goals with Ads, or even using a Blog to link and help build the rank and popularity of a website.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation – Optimization) is a necessary evil for your Blog if you want it to be indexed well and not placed in the supplemental index. Today we are going to cover some things you should try to accomplish with your Blog to help it’s indexing and subsequent rank with the use of SEO. Many Blogs reside on a very large host’s servers, like BlogSpot or WordPress. I am not going to cover server side SEO, but you can easily get the information to manage the proper canonical redirection.

Some of the things I will cover are actually SEM (Search Engine Marketing). I am just going to mix them in as opposed to making them separate steps, as they are meant to accomplish the sames tasks. Some stuff is universal, no matter the type of page. I apologize for any redundancy, but many Bloggers do not have other web pages and SEO knowledge….just skip over anything you already know.

1. When you create your Blog, use 1 or 2 keywords in the name / Domain / address name.
2. Blog posts should be a minimum of 600 words.
3. One subject per post.
4. Try to keep the amount of tags low and relevant. This will help keep the duplication monster away.
5. Do not steal others work. If you Blog someone else’s content, link, quote, and credit them. I highly recommend you write your own content, reproducing already published content will be duplicate, if not immediately then eventually. Then that post will no longer be working for you in search results.
6. Post everyday if you can, but on a regular schedule for best results!
7. Post’s content should be unique, your own. If you quote another source it should be a very small percentage of the post, and those words are excluded from your 600.
8. Use relevant titles. Try to use some keywords from the post text. The chain of events is like this, idea, post, then title. You can use this tool to paste your post body in and determine the densest words for keyword strength. Try to use 2 in your title, but most importantly make sure you have an attention grabbing title.
9. Try to use keywords in anchor text for links, in the whole Blog, not just posts.
10. When posting try to occasionally reference your own past posts for information, or explanation.
11. Pick some social bookmarking services to use, but not so many that you look like a link hound. You just don’t want too many buttons. You do need social bookmarking to be successful now, a days, in the Web 2.0 society.
12. Be choosy who and how many links you give out on any page. Page, even Blogs with too many outgoing links look like spam to Google.
13. Do not participate in reciprocal linking, it doesn’t work anymore. The links will be devalued and not help you, less they can actually harm you. Links to the same Domain count as 1.
14. Use Peek a Boo posts, or Post Summaries on your main page. This will allow visitors to view a few additional posts, and perhaps find content they are also interested in. Check your load time with the sitereportcard, and adjust the number of posts accordingly until your time at 28.8 is around 30 seconds. If your time is way over, you might want to reduce / crunch some images or just remove some.
15. You need categories. I use this tool to see my tag cloud, then I pick some categories from the densest tags on the graph. People like to click a category and go, and it helps those post pages get crawled more easily.
16. Keep your archives clean and easy to understand. Its best in the view of space if you use collapsed or drop down archives. They will still get crawled.
17. Use the site report card from above to check your Meta information. Some Blogger platforms, like Blogger, only produce title tags. You do not need a keyword tag, but I highly recommend you edit your template and include a description tag. Back your template/layout up first.
18. Adding live or streaming content is a big hook for search engines, IF you can get it to load fast enough. Blogger has video and news feeds that are easily customized to your own keywords.
19. Your text and background need to be highly contrasted. Accessibility is becoming a really big ranking factor, along side with trust. People with visual difficulty have as much right to your content as others. Clearly mark your links.
20. You need to build up links. The best way to do this is organically. There are some ways to help it along, link baiting, social bookmarking, and you can comment in forums and other Blogs RELEVANT to your Blog’s content. Non relevant links aren’t much help.
21. Ping, ping, ping…. I recommend you set forth a pinging regiment and stick to it. Most Blogging platforms have some pings build in, so when you publish, it pings. I use 2 services in addition, King Ping, which pings a huge list of great sites, and I ping Google Blogs. Only ping for new content, and only ping once…they will begin to ignore you or worse if you abuse the service.
22. Submit your site manually to relevant directories. Just search for your keyword(s) and directory: “SEO Directory”
23. Submit your feed to feed Directory using the same searching technique as above.
24. Submit your Blog to Search Engines. Manually, NEVER use an automated submission service, its quality not quantity.
25. Always try to answer your comments, social interaction can make or break your Blog.
26. If you have posted content on your site, or in a forum first or they have higher PageRank…and then you Blog it, the Blog post will be duplicate content and placed in the supplemental, even thought its yours. So remember, where you post your content is important. You may have Blogged an article, then a week later copy the article into a forum that has higher PageRank…then that forum will get the content and your Blog will get supplemental. Use very small excerpts, or ever better write a description.

I hope this has been helpful. As always if you have something to contribute, please comment.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

Categories: Blogging Posts
Tags: Blogger, Canonical, End Users, Google, Optimization Seo, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Supplemental Index