Everyone and their brother  have started up a blog these days, but many people just aren’t taking the steps needed to optimize their blogs for both readers and search engines. While it's true, anyone can start a blog. But is anybody reading it? Is there any traffic? Is it being indexed by the search engines?

There was a great article a while back at Search Engine Land. Jennifer Slegg gave 25 tips to help optimize a blog. Whether your blog is business or personal, you should ensure that you are optimizing your blog for both your readers (after all, you want to keep those readers coming back) and the search engines. Unfortunately, optimization is an important step that far too many blogs seem to be skipping over, even those that have a broad appeal to surfers and have the potential to be monetizable.

However, optimizing a blog is a bit different than your standard website search engine optimization (SEO), particularly because most blogs run off standard blog platforms, or worse, run as a hosted blog on someone else’s domain name. And there are design issues that can be unique to blogs which can impact your rankings.

Here  is a sampling of  the advice she gave and some I  think are important;

Offer RSS & Feed Subscription Buttons -  make it easy for readers to subscribe.

Make sure you have  descriptive posts titles utilizing keywords

Post often - don't let your blog become stagnant

Use tags and ping Technorati

Name  your images with keywords!  Not  36580477 jpg.

Create  a signature line to end every post with! Fill it with keywords and a link somehwere!

Make sure your permalinks are structured well.
      Bad  =  www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123
      Good = www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_
  Most blogging platforms allow you to change from the standard numbered permalinks to this style of search engine friendly ones. And just in case the blog platform you use has funky dynamic URLs for each entry, you will want to ensure that the bots can crawl them easily or use a mod rewrite to create a good structure such as in the example.

Make sure people have a way to contact you! There is nothing more irratating then not being able to contact the publisher of the blog!


    Derrick Sorles and Michael Snell
    Your Business MD's- Business Blog Consultants - We Help Bring New Business To You!