WSI Simply Social

A blog uses special search engine optimization techniques to get fast results on the search engines.  Blogs has a greater advantage over normal websites because of the new, fresh, unique and relevant content that can be posted and be made available immediately.  Even though you can almost gain a significant traffic boost to your blog, to increase its visibility should also be a main focus point for any blog.

Find below a couple of tips on increasing your blog’s visibility.

Your Domain

When selecting a domain, choose a name with targeted keyword phrases in it.  This is the foundation that all other strategies are built upon.  This can also make your URL more memorable by users that wants to return to your blog.

Blog Theme

The same SEO principals applies with a blog.  It is important to stay highly focused with your blog themes and topics.  Try not to mix up your topics to hurt your rankings on the search engines.

Blog title

Use keywords in your blog posts describing the content of the post.  This is one of the most important factors of any blog post as this is the first thing users will see when browsing your blog, viewing search engines results pages, RSS feed readers, etc.

Relevant quality content

Write informative content that could be useful to your readers.  Don’t write for search engines as this could lead to your blog being thrown into the blackhole what search engines call the “sandbox”.

Keywords in your links

Use keywords in your inbound and outbound links.  Relevant important links pointing to your website is one of the most powerful ways of climbing the search engine result pages.

RSS Aggregators

Submit your RSS feed to popular RSS aggregator websites that will often include a valuable one way backlink to your blog.  These RSS aggregator websites also helps with making your content immediately available.

One topic per post

The more tightly focused the theme of a page the better when Search Engines come to rank it. Sometimes you might find yourself writing long posts that end up covering a number of different topics.

XML and HTML sitemaps

Most popular blogging systems automatically creates and updates a XML sitemap with all the links of your blog into one file.  They are created in XML format so that search engine spiders can easily navigate to anywhere in your website.  Submit your XML sitemap file to Google’s Webmaster Tools as well as Yahoo Site Explorer.  This is a way to notify the search engines of any changes and updates made to your blog.

It is also advisable to create a normal static HTML sitemap for your readers so that they can find posts quickly.  You will also find plugins for most popular blogging systems that automatically creates a standard HTML sitemap for you and updating the file automatically.

Update regulary

The more often that you update and create new posts to your blog, the more often the search engines will send crawlers to your blog to index the new content.  You can also achieve this by adding “Social” bookmarking buttons to your blog posts where users can bookmark your content on popular social bookmarking websites.