10 Tricks to Optimize Your Blog

As fancy as “blog” sounds, a blog is just a website that uses a content management system. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for blog optimization are readily available.

1) Optimize your templates - You need to understand HTML and template language to edit the source code, but it pays off.
2) Use keywords in your blog post titles - This is a freebie for SEO. Most blogging software uses the post title as the url so take advantage of it.

Example:

“50 Ways To Write a T-Shirt Slogan - Search Engine Journal”
Search Engine Journal is included on every blog post title tag automatically.

3) Make it easy for your blog readers to subscribe and include RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” in a side bar or on a dedicated Subscription Info page. Here’s a handy RSS Feed Button creation tool.

4) Optimize Categories. When you create categories for your blog, be sure to consider keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate.

5) Social bookmarking sites can be excellent sources of traffic to your blog, so be sure to make it easy for readers to bookmark your blog posts. You can do this by adding some code to your blog template for each of the major social bookmarking sites. Here’s a tool for social bookmarking links. Here’s another tool that uses icons instead of text links.

6) Ping the major RSS feed and Blog search engines each time you post. This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you’re using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic or Pingoat.

7) Comments and Trackbacks. Be sure your blog software is configured to send a trackback ping to blogs that you cite within your posts. Pay attention to press releases distributed by PRWeb. If you cite a release, and ping the trackback link, the press release will in turn link to your blog. This is better for driving traffic than for link popularity.
Make useful comments on other blogs. Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter. Do NOT make comments that offer no value to the blog post. Do NOT use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.

9) Submit your blog to RSS and Blog directories. Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, MSN Business Central, etc) that have categories for blogs.

10) Offer RSS to Email. Anywhere from 10% to 40% of your blog traffic can come from individuals that perfer to read blog posts via email. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz, Squeet, Zookoda (this one is more for using blog posts as a weekly newsletter), RMail and Bloglet.

The important thing to remember is that no matter how many optimization tactics you employ with a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you’re optimizing.