Maintaining a blog costs money. A blog owner has to contend
with hosting service fees and other incremental expenses
associated with publishing a blog. However, there are several
techniques a blogger can employ to make his tight blog
marketing budget work. Foremost of these ploys is implementing
painstaking search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. SEO
helps lessen the costs of marketing a blog.
Search Engine Optimization – Some Key Points
How do you get readers to visit your blog when you are
competing with thousands of blogs around the blogosphere and
the typical web surfer seldom reads beyond the first few
results of a search query? This s the biggest challenge any
blogger has to face. Search engine optimization is the answer.
Search engine optimization is often described as the art and
science of improving the rankings of one’s blog within search
engine results. SEO is the best way to drive traffic to your
blog. Maximizing the benefits of a well-optimized blog will
yield earnings that will greatly help to cover the costs of
blogging.
There are certain things to remember when preparing to optimize
your blog. Your blog has to be attractive not only to your
visitors but to the search engine crawlers as well. If your
blog gets a good ranking in the search engine results pages
(SERP), it will mean better chances of getting visitors but it
will be up to the blog to keep them there and hopefully
encourages them to buy your product or avail of your service or
whatever purpose the blog is for.
Optimizing a blog is similar to optimizing a website. But
depending on the blogging tool you use, the results may vary. A
blogging software is a specific type of content management
system (software that provides a way for managing blogs).
Blogging software such as WordPress and MovableType have rich
sets of built-in optimization features that can make a blog
more search engine friendly. A blogging software provides a web
standard compliant interface that makes adding new blog posts
and integrating them into the blog’s navigational structure
quite easy. After making sure that your blog software is set up
in such a way that it takes full advantage of all the
optimization features, keyword rich content comes next.
A blog that provides detailed information about its area of
expertise will rank well in search engines for keywords
contained in the content. Content may take the form of
articles, news stories, guides and tips, industry trends and
company developments, to name a few. To come up with the right
keywords, always consider how you want your readers to find
your blog post in search engines and what will they type if
they want information on the topic you are writing. These will
provide you with hints on what words will be repeated all
throughout the article. Keywords can be used in the URL of a
blog post and post title. URLs and title tags are good places
for including your keywords since search engines are likely to
give these areas more weight when indexing blog pages.
Content per post should be about one specific topic as the more
focused the theme of a blog post the better when search engines
come to rank it. Adding fresh new posts on a regular basis is
highly recommended. The more you update, the more the search
engine robots will index the blog posts. Choose catchy domain
names for your blog that visitors will recall easily.
For the search engines to find you, submit your blog to them.
Submit your blog URL to be included in the index. This might
take time. A quicker way is to get linked by a blog already
indexed by the search engines.
There are also certain external factors that affect a blog’s
search engine ranking. The most important of these factors are
the inbound links. It is a widely accepted consensus that links
pointing to your blog or posts make it for possible for your
blog to rank higher in the search engine result pages. Every
link to your blog is interpreted by the search engines as
recognition bestowed on your blog. The best method to get these
much sought after links is to post relevant content that
visitors will want to read. After you publish a quality post on
a subject you know will be of interest to another blogger, you
may notify him through a short e-mail. If he does link, that
will be additional traffic and subsequently helps build your
own page rank in the search engines.
Another way to generate inbound links is to submit your blog on
RSS feeds to blog directories as well as other sites that will
list your blog. This is a very effective strategy. In fact,
bloggers usually submit their new blogs to different
directories. They submit links to important blog pages with
relevant keywords in the links. There are quite a number of
blog directories - http://DMOZ.org, Yahoo Directory and the
Best of the Web Blog Directory. These are the more prominent
ones. They offer free submissions.
Many blogs of the same nature exchange links with one another
and form interlink networks. The bloggers enjoy the benefits of
multiple sites and like-minded writers working together. Another
way to generate quality inbound links is to swap links with
other bloggers. Someone links to you so you link back. But in
most cases links are formally arranged between bloggers. You
can also generate inbound or backlinks to your blog by leaving
legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs. You
can also get links back to your blog using trackbacks.
Trackback is a method of informing another blogger that you
wrote a post related to what he had posted on his blog.
The above techniques will help your blog perform well and at
the same time lessen the costs of marketing your blog. Search
engine optimization is important but your readers come first.
So, it all comes back to quality content. If you are publishing
relevant content updated periodically, rest assure that great
sites will more likely link to your blog. As a blog publisher,
you definitely would like to be in good company.
Copyright © 2006, Danny Wirken
About The Author: http://www.theinternetone.net
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