Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
Much has been going on about SEO for websites, but with the evolution of blogs, it is important to recognize that some tweaks are needed to for most blog templates, to optimize for search engines.
We all know that building a website is only part of the strategy. If there is no means of marketing a website, a website is will be just another shop in the Sahara desert. With more people getting online everyday, and search engines being the major starting point for most Internet searching, it is important for every blogger to make sure that their blogs are optimized so that they can be found on the major search engines.
Unfortunately, most blogging platforms come out of the box, without much consideration of optimization for search engines. As such, bloggers need to be able to tweak their blog templates the right way to ensure maximum optimization.
What are the ways then? What are the things to tweak? Here are five to start off with!
1. Page Title
There is absolutely no way to argue that the page title is the most important thing to note for a page where SEO is concerned. Many blog engines like WordPress ship out wit the titles for individual posts in the format of [Blog Title] >> [Post Title]. This is not good for SEO, instead, one should eliminate the [Blog Title] in individual posts, or put it in the format [Post Title] – [Blog Title]
2. Meta Tags
It is critical to understand that with a permalink created for every post you make, there is a need to specify and different meta description and meta keyword tag for each post. Most blogging engines do not come default with this.
3. Your Blogroll
Most blogs feature a blogroll, and in the SEO point of view, it is important that these blogs you link to need to be of relevance to your blog. This not only helps spiders better identify what topic your blog is about, but also encourages the bloggers in your blogroll to link back.
4. Blog Archives
Blogs normally feature a reverse chronological order of posts, and as new posts are added to the main page, the old posts are rolled off the page. It is important to keep the these old post linked via your main page, in some way or another.
Often this is done using a blog archive. The advantage of using a good blogging platform is that most of the time the archiving is done automatically for you. Bloggers can choose to archive by week or by month. However, some may unknowingly adopt a one-column template and layout that does not feature the archives.
5. Frequent Posting
This is by far the most effective way of optimization for search engines. Search engines have a job to do – to bring the best and the freshest news to the Internet user behind the search box. By updating your blog frequently, as much as even a couple of times a day, you are telling the search engines that “Hey, my blog has fresh content, so come often!”. Blogs that are updated frequently will see that the search engine spiders come frequently to actively seek new content, and it is only when your post is indexed that it appears in the search engine results pages.
For more great articles on blog marketing, check out Kian Ann’s blog – Blog Marketing Singapore
January 4, 2007 at 12:05 am
Good tips, but also slightly out of date. SEO has changed dramatically as search engine technology has also improved and changed.
Meta tags are no longer as important as they once were as few search engines pay attention to them. Your blogroll plays little impact on your search engine optimization, and archives aren’t helpful either, as you described them. What is helpful about archives is not about specific archives but how your site’s navigation helps search engines find all the intra-connecting links between your posts so they can crawl your entire site not just a few pages.
Search engines don’t always enter through the front page, so the issue of the power of your front page for search engines isn’t as important as your overall navigational links found on every page which leads to another page and another and so on. A good site map, category and tag lists, and other navigational aids help the crawler move through the site, as does a good XML Sitemap hidden in your host server files for search engines to read like an index to your site.
The key to good search engine optimization is designing the underlying code of your web pages to permit search engines to get to the information they need to catalog in their database without hindrance. Let nothing get in the way of you and the search engine web crawler.
You can learn more about making your WordPress blog SEO friendly in Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Guide.
January 4, 2007 at 10:36 am
Thanks Lorelle – your insights are always so inspiring
Your last paragraph really says it all – “Let nothing get in the way of you and the search engine web crawler.”
Really appreciate your thoughts! Thanks!
January 4, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Important to page rank is also the quality of links pointing towards you – something I think you were getting at with the blogroll. One of the benefits to hosting a blog on WordPress is the high page rank it has. It’s own internal links – say by listing all the posts for tag SEO – combined with the good (CSS & XHTML) code built into WP help to quickly get your posts ranked. So all you really need to add is good, original content.
Great post.
January 4, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Thanks! Yes I think good content is the best “optimization” in my opinion – good content is the best link bait – automatic incoming links from everywhere, not to mention getting into social media sites like Digg
January 5, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Im a new blogger; I just started a couple of months ago. I use Serendipity for my blog and have come to really like it. It’s not as well known as Word Press for example but has been very flexible for me and the support is excellent. Especially considering it is open source. I use a plugin that automatically pings a list of blog search engines every time I post an article. I use Sitemeter and watch it like a hawk to see what the referral links are. Google (worldwide) accounts for a good 90% of my hits. Theres another plugin I use that updates the site map for the spiders with every post too. I have a link to Ping-O-Matic and I manually ping a number of search engines at least once a day. I have a nav bar at the foot of every post for easy navigation. Any more suggestions would be very welcome. Ill warn you ahead of time Im a very politically incorrect conservative (but not a Republican) and my blog reflects that.
January 5, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Thanks Rico, I too, started really blogging only months ago. The blogosphere is young, so no worries. Its better to start now when Technorati is tracking 57 million blogs, than when it has 570 million blogs (which I think, is not far from now).
Its great that you harness the use of plugins for your site – they make the workload a lot easier sometimes, but do also take note that not all plug-ins fix problems, some create more problems.
Personally I don’t like snap preview plugin – especially if the link is an internal link. For example, if you hover over you nav bar, there is practically no use of the plugin because every link looks the same!
If you wish to further tweak the site’s code, I would recommend that you make the current H1 “ThePoliticalBlog” into a a graphic (which you already have in the middle), and change the current H2 headers into H1, and that is where you major keywords would go.
The reason for this is that is that “ThePoliticalBlog” will probably not do as well in search engines as “The Political Blog” (with spaces). If you visit http://www.blogopreneur.com, you will see that it is what I do also – “Blogopreneur” makes no sense to Google, so I used “Blog Marketing Singapore” instead. “Blogopreneur” is a brand name, and “Blog Marketing” is what I do.
I’ve not read any literature or referenced anywhere that says about connected words in the text, but this is my best guess. Hope that helps.
January 7, 2007 at 8:17 am
There is a difference between “ThatPoliticalBlog” and “That Political Blog” to the search engines as we know that the search engine still cannot understand the meaning of the word like a human reader.
However, in this case, it does not really matter whether you use “ThatPoliticalBlog” or “That Political Blog”.
First, “That” is ignored by the search blog.
Second, political and blog are two very common words – too general to optimize for. In my opinion, even “political blog” is too general and you can do a bit more research to get a more specific area of politics to target and optimize for.
Thirdly, I guess “ThatPoliticalBlog” is more for branding than search optimization and it is a good brandable domain name – I like it.
As far as SEO is concerned, it is a good suggestion to convert ThatPoliticalBlog to a graphic and use the H1 tag for the title of each post instead, to fully take advantage of the Title.
This may be trivial to some people, but it is the small things that the search engines look for when it comes to decide which web page should be on top and which goes below.
January 7, 2007 at 10:05 am
Thanks Shi!
Understood! 
January 9, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Thanks for all the good advice. I am sorry it took so long to get back but I lost the link to this page and had to actually go back thru the logs of my sitemeter account from Kian’s visit to my blog.
With the existing Serendipity software Im sort of limited as to the placement of graphics or changing the H1 and H2 areas. But I am working on learning how to edit and customize the templates used for the package. The basic package is very plain jane vanilla. I have had to really push the limits of what the plugins will do to get what I have so far. But I will keep working on it. I should have used WordPress rather than Serendipity I know but the admin controls for Serendipity were very similar to another program Im familiar with and workign with it came very easily as compared to WordPress which was almost painful for me.
The point about “branding” as to the blogs name is exactly right. Its easy to remember and almost impossible to mis spell. I saw a video site some time ago called “that video site’ and never had any problem remembering it. I also own the domain name ‘thatpoliticalsite” for a possible larger portal style site i plan on down the road. I just checked and “thatpoliticalforum” just expired and I am going to snag it tonight just in case for a political forum.
I recently did a piece about a specific item in the news and my traffic literally increased 1000% for about 3 days as the article headline was a very popular Google search on events in Iraq. So Ive started watching sites that list the most popular searches and work that into my article headlines. Now after a couple of weeks the traffic has died down but is still a bit more than twice what it was before the surge and I think a lot of its due to careful choice of article headlines. I think playing the search engines this way is a valid tactic as long as its not just making up nonsense articles to lure people there. My Sitemeter account lists all the search strings people used to get to me so i figure why not use it?
Before starting this blog I was an administrator at a political discussion forum and learned a lot on how to keep people interested and wanting to come back. The way I see it theres three things I need to do to keep them coming back 1) fresh interesting content 2) New features in the sense of things the site will do for them (I constantly tweak my sites appearance and functionality) and 3) Bright shiny objects. I figure the most inportant thing is to get peoples attention and then convince them to keep coming back.
I know it is going to take time to establish a good depth of content and a solid readership. I figured at least two years to get things going well. It would be nice if eventually I can make some $$$ from it but even if I dont thats ok as I love writing.
I will keep coming back and reading, thanks again for all the good info.
~RJH
January 9, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Thanks Rico for checking back! Its been a pleasure to share and hopefully we have been of help. You are right – as far as SEO is concerned, the age of the site does matter (all other things equal). The more solid content you have on your site, the better it will perform.
However, as much as we do SEO, it is also important to know that eventually the real readers you are targeting for are the human readers – so write for humans first before you optimize for search engines.
The search engines’ job is to give the best and most relevant results for human searches, so its logical to think that the best article for humans in that topic would (in the ideal SE world) rank the best in the SERPs.