Top Five Tips for Blog SEO
Blogs Attract More Search Engine Traffic
Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages. They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked.
Blog Directories and Site Submission
If you haven’t already submitted to blog directories, you are missing out on some great one-way links. Many of the top directories can be found on Robin Good’s Top 55 list. But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then your new listings can help your site get the best keyword placement in the major search engines.
Tip One: Blogs and SEO – Keywords
You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a“lucrative keyword”. Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.
More Web Site Traffic and More Sales? Not Always
You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.
Length of Search Query is a Factor
A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.
Target Your Blog for More Traffic and Sales
It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic – there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales. Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004.As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you’ll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them.
Tip 2: Blogs and SEO – Keyword Placement
Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme. You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the pages URL names, or even a combination of Technorati tags and the text of your permanent links that appear after each post.
Tip 3: Blogs and SEO – Timely Posting
Instead of pinging at 15 minute intervals when your site hasn’t been updated, or even pinging after every single post, you can actually get better results if you update or ping just once during one of three sweet spots in the day – typically early in the morning (or at least before noon).
Check your web site statistics. If you’re getting spidered every two weeks or even monthly, you can increase your number of spider visits by blogging on the anniversary of the period that the spider comes to your site. It takes a bit of monitoring, but you can often predict when the date of your last spider visit was. An even faster way is to ping at a time when the spider is reading a page that carries your update.
Tip 4: Blogs and SEO – Get Linked
Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Robin Good’s guide can get you some great one way links.If you sparingly include the lucrative keyword you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the spiders as they follow the link through to your site.
Once there, if you use these and other tips to skew your blog a little more to the search-engine-friendly side, the synergistic effect is better, more profitable traffic.
Tip 5: Blogs and SEO – Frequent Updates
The more you post, the more food for the spider, which can cause the spider to react by splitting up its job into several visits, whereupon you have even more content, and so on, until the spider just adds you to a more frequent schedule of returns.
For example, my main site gets spidered several times daily by Google, and yet I can go a week without an update with no change in spider visits. This means my pages get indexed more often and my new pages show up faster. Think of what that could do for the launch of your next product.
Bottom Line: Blogs and Search Engine Optimization
You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. In fact, some blog software will let you set up your posts in advance, so that you can have posts show up daily even though you technically only blog once a month.
A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.
Tinu Abayomi-Paul is a website promotion specialist and author of five books and ebooks for the online entrepreneur. Her last project was a contribution to Rok Hrastnik’s comprehensive guide to RSS: “Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS”. You can find more of her daily tips on RSS, Blogs, Google tools, and more, at her main blog, Free Traffic Tips.
