Recipe for Blog Optimization
tips from the web marketing Chef…
There was a recent question on Food Blog S’cool regarding search rankings for individual blog posts. While writing a response I ended up putting together quite a long list of search optimization tips which I thought would make a helpful post. These are my tried and true techniques based on years of testing seo strategies (I do search marketing for a living). These techniques are very simple to implement and totally acceptable under search engine terms of service. Good optimization is not about tricking search engines, it’s about formatting and promoting your site in way that provides direction to both people and search bots.
Keep in mind that there is no one thing that will get your site good search rankings; they’re affected by a combination of things including how well other sites are optimized for whatever keywords you’re looking at. The three most important elements are quality backlinks (inbound links from sites with high authority), keyword rich page title tags, and static internal links.
Search bots generally won’t index deeper than the home page on new sites or sites with few backlinks, or it will only index once in a great while. While you can submit your site directly to search engines and even use a system like the Google sitemaps it is best to get your site naturally indexed through backlinks from other sites. The more backlinks that point to your site the more often and deeper your site will be indexed.
There are a number of tracking sites where you can get backlinks like Technorati and Del.icio.us, or if you have RSS enabled most blog programs have will auto ping certain trackers every time you post (Pingomatic.com is a good meta tracker).
Blog Optimization Basics!
1. Use individual post pages and permalinks. Each post should be accessible by a permanent link to a specific page that includes only that post. This can be used in conjuction with category or date archives where multiple posts are located on one page.
2. If possible hyperlink your post titles (it’s much better to have descriptive text as the link instead of one that simply states “permalink”).
3. Include the post title in the page title tag. The page title is shown in the top-most bar on your web browser window. Most blogging scripts have a way to automatically include the post title if you’re using individual post pages.
4. Turn on RSS feeds for your blog and enable auto pings for Pingomatic.com if possible.
5. Use search engine friendly links when possible. Search bots usually do not index script elements like Javascript, redirect links, or links to pages with file names that include database queries or ID sessions. Popup boxes or drop down menus are often created with Javascript.
6. Avoid using a design that includes frames!
If you’d like more tips on optimizing a Blogger Blog…view my FBS post.
Now I could write quite a bit more on this subject, but it’s not exactly foodie worthy. Really I just wanted to help out a number of my lovely blogging friends with some tasty tech bytes. Let’s get back to our regular programming!
