How to help Google find your blog (making SEO work for you)

Wow! This is the 4^th in our series on blogs. Here’s a quick review in case you missed the first ones:

• Anatomy of an effective blog
• Let a Blog Reader save you time
• How can I setup my own blog?

Today’s topic is ‘How to help Google find your Blog’ or it could be ‘What you need to know about SEO’.

What is SEO you ask? SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and is important to anyone that wants to be noticed on the net. I’ve started a couple of blogs and they were more like a journal because I felt like I was talking to myself. We blog because we want people to read what we’re saying & interact with us. And I must say that this series on blogging has been fun because people are leaving comments!

Google is the major search engine, but there are others. They have spyders out crawling thru the net cataloging blogs and gathering information. Your goal is to have your blog & site as SEO friendly as possible so you get noticed!

How can you do that?

Choose a domain name that suits your subject matter. Heidi & I agree that our domain name could have been better chosen. We chose it based on being descriptive, but it really should be based on what the majority will search for. But, I have seen many cautions about not changing your domain name mid-stream, so we will stick with ours. This site makes it easy to see if the domain name is available. http://www.checkdomain.com/ There are also resources for checking common keyword phrases. One application that I found useful is free called Good Keywods. You can give it a word or phrase & it will tell you how many times it has been searched in the past month along with related words.

Choose a blog style that can be personalized. That’s what we’ve done with our wrodpress blog. This is the behind the scenes types of things. Here’s the part of the description that influenced me to choose the style we are presently using:

heavily tuned and optimized for search engine relevancy: page titles are always relevant (the front page even shows your blog’s tagline), post content goes first in the HTML source, and semantic markup is used everywhere http://rudd-o.com/projects/burninr/

Tags & titles are very important once you have your blog up & running. Search engines don’t notice the body of the blog as much as they notice those two things. Tags are descriptive words that you assign to your post. Let’s say if I wrote a post about ACDSee Photo Manager. I would tag it with ‘organizing’. Posts tagged with ‘organizing’ would end up getting noticed by a Google search first.

Titles are also important. Pretend like you’re writing a newspaper headline. State the topic & be concise. This will also be noticed by the search engines sooner than something vague. I have to remind myself of this one often.

Inbound links – Awhile ago I posted about the importance of linking to other blogs whether by blogrolls or referenced within a post. This builds up credibility or your blog in the eyes of the search engines. On the bottom left of our blog you can see a list of who recently linked to our blog. Writing this just gave me a great idea that I may have to try!

Sitemaps – Sitemaps are text files (XML files to be exact) that list all your url’s for a website or blog. They help the search engines crawl/explore your site better including your blog. On wordpress, I have found a plug-in that generates and automatically updates my sitemap for our wordpress blog. Google Sitemap Generator Install the plug-in and follow the directions. It automatically submits your sitemap to google and you can also submit your sitemap to Yahoo or MSN. When you submit, you really are submitting a link to your sitemap. Then each time a post or page is added to your blog, the sitemap is updated.

If you would like to read more on Search Engine Optimization, Problogger has 15 ideas that are practical & easy to implement.

So you may ask, how do you know that SEO works? In my next topic I will show you how we’re collecting stat’s for our blog from free applications running in the background. That’s the most interesting part & provides feedback for improving your blogging. I check 3 sets of stat’s each day (can we say addicted?!! Maybe!).

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