Problogger Diary

Continued from Part 1.

6. Search Me!
A ridiculous number of books have been written about it, but there are few things on the Web as arcane as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)—you never know what’s going to boost your search engine ranking and when. SEO-ing your blog works better if you’re using your own hosting and content management sys tem—the options available to you are far more comprehensive than free blog hosting. However, there are a few things you can do to enhance your free blog’s search ranking.

7. SEO-ing Your Free Blog.
Firstly, let go of any illusions you might have that Blogger users are at an advantage just because Google owns Blogger. The following tips apply almost universally too:

a. Choose your blog and post titles appropriately. You’ll need some thing catchy to grab potential readers, but search engines would prefer that you include at least one keyword indicative of the post’s content in every post title.
b. Stick to a general theme for your blog. By their very nature, blogs are riddled with search keywords, and themed blogs more so.

c. Update your blog regularly. Search engines love the “live” Web sites that are updated with new content on a regular basis.

d. Register yourself on every possible blog listing.

e. Exploit the power of being linked to—make comments on high traffic blogs (not the I-like-your-site-you-might-like-mine kind, mind you), start discussions, and get yourself blogrolled on as many people’s blogs as possible.

f. Wherever available, always make sure that you have a perma link for each post—this helps search engines index them better.

g. Add your blog feed to your My Yahoo! and My MSN accounts. This will get you listed on Yahoo! and MSN.

8. Your Own Hosted Blog.
If you’re using your own hosting, SEO becomes much easier thanks to the number of options you have. WordPress, for one, offers you its own CMS which you can deploy on your server, and there are a lot of things you can do with it.

SEO And WordPress.
To optimise your WordPress blog, use the following tips:

a. Permalinks Again: By default, links to posts in your blog will look like this: http://www.yourblog.com/?p=11. Search engines don’t like this much, so go to Options > Permalinks in your admin panel and in the Custom text box, enter “/%catego ry%/%postname%” to change the link’s appearance to http://www.yourblog.com/technology/phone_review. This makes your blog not only SEO-friendly, but reader-friendly as well. This applies to all CMSes, in fact—most of them support SEO- friendly URLs, either as an inbuilt feature or using a plugin— you just need to make sure that the Web server supports URL renaming.

b. Edit The Page Title: By default, your page title (the one you see in the search pages) goes thus: Blog Name | Archive | Post Title. You want to bring the post title to the beginning, so search users can instantly know that they’ve found what they were looking for. To do this, you need to replace this code in header.php:

With this:

c. Get Sitemapped: Get yourself the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress from www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google- sitemaps-generator-v2-final. Sitemapping your blog will make it easier for Google bots to index updated content for your site. This tip applies even for non-WordPress blogs, and you can get the Google Sitemap Generator at www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps.

9. The Community.
This is the “getting famous with the people” part we talked about earlier. Once you’ve done all you can for the search engines, you need to get yourself noticed.

a. Take a long, hard look at the content you’re generating. Are you another armchair columnist airing your views on news items like a billion other bloggers? What makes you unique? There’s a huge difference between getting people to come to your blog and getting them to stay there. There’s no trick that will help you if your content is poor or run-of-the-mill. Naturally, writing style plays an important role too. Don’t underestimate the spell check, and proofread every post before you publish.

b. Update your blog regularly. Regular updates will keep your readers coming back for more, and it’ll help with the search engines, too.

c. Take part in discussions inside the blogging community. Intelligent comments on others’ blogs (don’t spam them) will generate interest in you. Doing so on high-traffic blogs will ensure that someone will visit your profile, and subsequently your blog.

d. Get into link-exchange deals with similar-themed bloggers—get them to link to you on their blogs, and vice versa. In general, make sure that there are links to your blog all over the place— get your friends to put you on their blogrolls, use step 3 above to others to deem you worthy of blogrolling, and so on.

e. E-mail people when you’ve made a new post. If you get stinkers for spamming, just stick to e-mailing people when you have some killer “don’t miss this” content.
f. Get Dugg: lots of blog owners Digg their own blogs, resulting in the site’s paranoia when it comes to blogs. However, participate in the Digg community as well, and people might end up Digging your blog for you! Finally, remember that blogging is an ever-changing realm, and there’s nothing you shouldn’t stop yourself from trying if it isn’t illegal.

Bloggers are journalists of sorts, and there exists such a thing as ethics in journalism. In addition, when you maintain a blog, you’re garnering the trust of many people—which may not hit you in the face while you’re sitting at your computer. Ethics does come into play in such a situation, and while we’re not going to be preachy, we think we should talk a little about the ethical aspect of blogging.

Go Back to Part 1.

Posted by Problogger Diary at Thursday, March 26, 2009