SEO Blogging Tips to Help Your Blog

I’ll try and keep this short and sweet. The following are some tips that can help your blog rank well in the search engines and generally help drive traffic. I am going to start at the beginning and so if you already have a blog then you can skip a few lines.

Starting Out

If you do not have a blog and are looking to start one I (like many others) recommend you use WordPress or Blogger. Both blogging software are very good as they extremely SEO friendly and also easy to update and customise. The beauty of a WordPress blog is that you can attach it to your site which can have some benefits (depending on your objectives).

Choosing Your Blog Name

This actually has some importance. It is advised if possible to get your keyword into the blog name. So if your blog is about Hardcore House Music (this is not my attempt to get down with the kids), then you should make sure that it is contained (if possible) in your blog name. So for a Blogger account it could be hardcore-house-music.blogspot.com and if it is a WordPress blog attached to your site perhaps www.yoursite.com/hardcore-house-music-blog. There is a lot of debate open about how much emphasis Google puts on domains that contain keywords but it is generally agreed that it is a lot and so you are already gaining an advantage in the search genies by having this.

Think of a Niche

Put a different spin on any stories to do with your area of interest. By posting about something a bit different or something no one has posted about before it you can (an most likely will) appear highly in the search engines. However this must lead onto my next point…

Post Titles

Make sure that keywords you want to perform well are mentioned in the title. You have written a nice piece of information that people may search for but the posts title is not good enough to get you the visibility on the search engines. Be specific and narrow it down. The more you be specific in the title the better in order to get these long tail keywords. So for a top 10 list of Hardcore House Music Tracks of 2009 the title should read exactly that ‘Top 10 List of Hardcore House Music Tracks of 2009’ and not something like ‘List of Hardcore House Music Tracks’.

Containing Keywords in Body Text

Make sure that you contain keywords in the body of the post. Put keywords as outbound links and this is especially when linking to source content and also mention the keyword a good number of times in the post (but not too much).

Post Regularly

The number one rule in blogging! The more you post the more Google will keep coming back for more. (FYI I see regularly as anything from 4 posts a week upward).

Submit RSS Feed and Blog URL to Prominent RSS and Blog Directories / Search Engines

www.pingomatic.com is a useful tool for pinging new posts to all the prominent blog directories. Use this every time you make a new post listing your blog’s URL.

Get Social

You have a blog, you write fresh content regularly, and you have followed all of the above. The next step is to promote it! It is advisable to create a few accounts with popular social media sites. At present I would recommend Twitter. Build up a good following and make Tweets that tells people of new blog posts. Twitter feed is a good for feeding your blog posts to Twitter.

Add a Sitemap

I will make this my last point. There are other points to be made such I’m sure and I am aware I have not mentioned the meta information but I think I will stop here. You will have to purchase the hosing writes to your blog (especially the case with Blogger accounts) but it is a good idea to put in an xml sitemap and then ping it to the search engines.