How To Optimize Your Blog

By Tim on April 2009

The post title for this may be slightly misleading, you see I am not going to go over the usual “make sure your title headings Meta’s” are targeted for SEO.. In stead I want to go through some ways to utilise your blog in order to create peak performance.

So yes we are going to talk about optimisation but in a slightly different format.

Longtail Keywords

Yes your right I have touched on this before, however repetition is the mother of skill right? Anyway your blog posts are the ideal place to target longtail low competition keywords. Let me give you an example, look at the below keywords I checked out for this post;

Now there are various low traffic competition keywords I can tailor this post to “how to optimize blog” “how to optimize blogger”. All are perfect to target a post to and if I can rank highly for the keywords and it brings in 50 visitors a month from 1 post, I would consider that a success. Use the title of your post to target the high traffic keyword variation and fill the content body with the smaller variations.

Build Your Links

Every time you post you also create a new page. If you use blogger simply go to settings > archiving > and enable post pages. As you have created a knew page you have the ability to create new, targeted links. As those of you who read my blog will know I link back to my homepage with each post, this helps in two ways.

1 – It helps PageRank flow back to my main page
2 – It allows me to optimise links back to my home page

Now I know internal links hold far less weight but every little counts. I would suggest anchoring at least one targeted keyword per post back to your home page. If you have a business blog target the keyword back to your business home page. If you have a network of blogs you can call on the power of cross linking ie;

Blog A > Links To > Blog D

Blog D > Links To > Blog C

Blog C > Links To > Blog B

Try not to triangulate your linking if you have a blog network, search engines will pick up on this and quickly devalue your links.ie

Blog A > Links To > Blog B

Blog B > Links To > Blog A

Using blogs to create link authority can be extremely powerful if used correctly and allows you to manipulate the flow of PageRank and place it where you want it.

Carnivals

Whilst were on the subject of PageRank I want to talk about blog carnivals. Now I have never really liked carnivals for 2 reasons.

1 – They are time consuming
2 – They provide very little in terms of traffic

However when I first started this blog I thought I would submit 5 or 6 posts. Looking back at them posts now I see they all have a PR between 1 and 3. Thats right believe it or not my homepage does not have the most amount of PR. Submitting to the carnivals allows you to build PageRank to deep pages, which will in time flow back to your homepage. If there was no other reason for submitting to carnivals this alone justifies it.

One final thing, if you use blogger, do not copy and paste your posts from Word, this creates masses of unnecessary formatting code and your code to content ratio will suck. Try writing it in raw html and read over it a few times to check for spelling errors.

Ok so to summarise, optimze your blog by;

- Targeting longtail keywords
- Creating Optimised Links
- Submitting to carnivals and creating PageRank to deep pages

See ya

Tim

Author: Tim (292 Articles)

Tim Grice is the owner and editor of SEO wizz and has been involved in the search engine marketing industry for over 7 years. He has worked with multiple businesses across many verticals, creating and implementing search marketing strategies for companies in the UK, US and across Europe. Tim is also the Head of Search at Branded3, an SEO agency in Leeds.

Tagged as: Google Seo, Internet Marketing Consultants, Search Engine Optimisation Lessons, SEO Advice, SEO For Blogs, SEO Tips

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