A blog is one of the best and easiest ways to generate fresh, up to date content
for your site as well as link love. Good, quality content naturally attracts links, but
there are ways to optimize your blog to get the biggest bang for your buck.
What is a blog? Short for web log, a blog is a content management system,
basically an interactive web site that allows you to create and post content
through a web-based control panel. Rather than create a web page and upload it,
you just log into your blog control panel and write articles and post them. They
are live immediately and readers can post comments so that it is a more
interactive experience for the visitor.
For some, a blog can completely replace a traditional web site.
And, one of the great features of a blog is the built-in RSS feed that visitors can
subscribe to for keeping up with your new content. An RSS feed is commonly
referred to as "Really Simple Syndication" and it does just what the name
suggests - it allows your blog articles and news to be automatically retrieved by
user feed readers (like Google Reader, MyYahoo, BlogLines, etc.) all over the
world as you post them. The distribution potentially drives traffic, deep links and
popularity to your blog which can help with your rankings. Pretty cool, huh?
As with your blog, there are also some ways to maximize your RSS feed, too.
Bottom line - if you don't have a blog, get one now!
So, as a follow-up to my S E O 101 post which recommends a blog as a way to
enhance your site's optimization, here are a few tips to get you going with your
blog and feed campaign. The plugins (small prgrams that add features to your
blog, usually free) mentioned are specifically for the free self-hosted version of
WordPress, probably the most popular blog platform currently used, but the
concepts apply to all blogs.
1. Use full text in your RSS feed. It is common to just include the first
paragraph or two (a summary) in what goes out in the feed and then insert a
"More" link to get the reader to go to your blog. That diminishes your ability to get
back links from services like TechMeMe because any links below the "More"
won't appear. Use the full text. Don't worry about your feed being duplicate
content. According to Rick Klau, formerly of Feedburner and now with Google, a
feed in itself will never be considered duplicate content.
2. Optimize the text in the RSS feed just like you should with your posts and
web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
3. RSS feeds with podcasts and video enclosures will get you into additional
RSS directories and engines. Be sure to use show notes for your podcasts and
videos, though. Remember, search engines love text and can't yet pull content
from multimedia files.
4. Include tag clouds on pages. Tag clouds are basically keywords from posts
on your blog that are linked to a search results page on your blog that include all
articles related to the keyword. Let's say the word that shows up in the "cloud"
(basically just a list) is "widgets" and you click on it. You'll get a page showing all
posts on your blog that are tagged with the "widgets" tag. To produce tag clouds,
Ultimate Tag Warrior, a free plugin for WordPress, can be used.
5. Use a Related Posts plugin. Crosslinking to related posts on your blog helps
with your internal linking, making keyword rich anchor text more prominent on
your blog as well as helping your visitors navigate your site. Use a related posts
plugin for WordPress like Contextual Related Posts.
6. Top Ten Posts with links. This can be automated with yet another plugin that
automates the process of deciding which posts get clicked on the most and
placing a list on your blog for visitors (and spiders) to see and follow. Popularity
Contest is a good WordPress plugin for this.
7. Add Technorati tags to your posts. Technorati tracks blogs and social
media and tagging your posts can help spread the word about your content. Go
to Technorati, register for an account (it's free) and claim your blog as your own.
A nice plugin to help automate the placement of Technorati tags on your blog is
Simple Tags.
8. Optimize your TITLE. Don't just let your blog software automatically create
the TITLE for your post by pulling the text out of your post heading. Customize
and optimize it. The S E O TITLE Tag plugin is perfect for WordPress. And, just
like with any web page TITLE, put your company name or the name of the blog
at the END (if you must include it at all). Unless you are Coca Cola or Microsoft,
NOBODY will be searching for it. Sorry...
9. Make posts sticky. By using a "sticky post" plugin, you can create keyword
rich content that will stay at the top of a category page, for instance, rather than
moving down as additional content is posted. I am currently using WP Sticky.
10. Create Sitemaps. The search engines can follow your RSS feed sitemap just
like they can follow one for a normal web site. Create sitemaps for each category
RSS feed and tell the search engines about them, either by pointing to them in
your robots.txt file or by submitting them to Yahoo Site Explorer or Google
Webmaster Central.
11. Use Feedburner. Feedburner offers a ton of free features that can add to
your blog's optimization and marketing efforts, including stats, post e-mail
notifications, the ability to include Flickr photo posts and much more. Recently
bought by Google, features that were previously paid services like MyBrand are
now free.
12. Use Optional Excerpts. When you make a post, WordPress will grab some
text to display on your category page and in your feed (if you aren't using a full
feed as described above). Unfortunately, it doesn't always grab good text. Using
the Optional Excerpts feature in WordPress, you can type in the exact keyword
rich, topical text that you want displayed.
13. Domain name - In a nutshell, if you think having your blog on a separate
domain from, say, your business, will give you more authority and street credit
then go for it. It boils down to a choice of mydomain.com/blogname or
blogname.com.
14. Use the Update Service built into WordPress. This is in the Options menu
and all you do is place a list of URLs to different services like Feedster, Netgator,
Technorati, etc. and whenever you make a post, those services will be notified.
You can find a list of the services at WordPress Update Service.
15. CEO blogging - priceless! If you are running a business, particularly a
consumer driven business, get your CEO blogging! CEO influence on a blog is
incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. And, responding to reader
comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
