Optimizing Your New Blog For Search Engine Rankings
August 14, 2007 by Pablo Palatnik
Over the last two years or so, search engines have favored blogs in a big way. Blogs provide pure content (at least before the made-for-adsense blogs exploded in the scene) and content is king. Haven’t heard that one before have you? Ok, maybe you have.
Matt Cutts, one of the Google gods, shared some tips to optimize your blog. You can literally start a blog and get traffic within HOURS thanks to social media websites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. But let me tell you, there is no better feeling than taking a look at your analytics and starting to see natural organic traffic from keywords your blog starts ranking for, and it’s not a question of IT if it ranks, but a matter of when if you optimize right. A great source for optimizing and monetizing your blog is Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger.net.
The skill that is required most to optimize is persistence…be on top of your SEO efforts and you will start to rank.
Blog Post Keywords- I particularly don’t really go into keyword research for this blog at all, but write content based on the latest news, ideas I come up with, and basically anything I think people should be informed about or can entertain. I make sure to add keywords I want to rank for in my TITLE and always try to have keyword density in your content. You aren’t going to rank for a keyword you only use once unless the keyword has no competition…and these days…good luck with that. ALT TAGS are also key in your content. DO NOT go posting images all over your blog without using ALT TAGS. You want the engines to crawl your blog and be able to read everything and it’s a great way to include some of that keyword density that you may need to help the strength of the keyword in the blog post. The key factor that has helped my blog is the keywords in the URL. In a few months, maybe even weeks, you will start ranking eventually as you acquire links and so fourth.
Social Media Strategy- If you create a good social media strategy for your blog, it can really go a long way. Social media websites can get you backlinks faster than you think…especially if you can hit the homepage of Digg, Netscape, etc. ONE story can really make a difference.
Comment with Content- The engines value links from coming from relevant websites so that’s where you want most of your links coming from. Comments on a blog can help not only drive a few visitors here and there but it is a link. More people read blog post comments than some may think. A good interesting blog post comment can get the attention of many if the topic is a hot one.
Widget/Unique Tool: You want serious links…? Create a widget/tool other blogs/websites will link to for others to use. If it can help others, believe me, word will spread and get you LINK and TRAFFIC instantly.
Blog Karma- I think this one is huge and might not make sense in a way to many, but basically WRITE FOR THE PEOPLE, NOT FOR THE ENGINES. The only way you will get link love from other bloggers, news sites, etc is through informative, good content blog post. With so many blogs now made for pure monetizing purposes (pay-per-post articles, made-for-adsense blogs) it is more and more evident to web/blogmasters the intention behind the article.
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Comments (1)
On the money with “Blog Karma”, love the term and concept.