Getting traffic from popular search engines like Google can really help increase your readership as a blogger. The following are some tips to help improve the SEO of your blog.
SEO = Search Engine Optimization
1) Have a site map
A site map makes it easier for search engines to index your content and find the relevant goodies that they’re looking for.If you are using WordPress use Google sitemap.
2) Write unique or pillar articles
You may have seen the term “Pillar Article” used a bit around blogging. Essentially a pillar article is an article that is good enough or significant enough to encourage other blogger’s to link to it. Write something that is that great enough that your readers will want to link to it on their own blog. An article with a lot of external links aiming at it is search engine gold.
3) Links to others
Linking is a key part to gaining a good rank from search engines. People like John Chow take advantage of this by encouraging readers to write reviews of his blog and link to it using specific anchor text (for example: “Make Money Online”) to improve their ranking. So if getting links from others is your goal, linking to other is essential. Some people will offer link exchanges, typically offering a link in an article or on their blog roll in exchange for the same from you.
4) Comment on blogs with “Do follow”
Comment on blogs with “Do follow” like this blog. Most blogging software by default will set a do not follow tag to comments left on the blog. This means that the link to your blog that is left when you post a comment will not be followed by the search engines like Google. Some blogger’s like myself remove this tag to encourage readers to post comments, as commenting has the added reward of getting the commenter a link back. Feel free to leave a relevant comment on this blog.
5) Direct link to your articles
Google likes to link directly to relevant content rather than to home pages or index pages of your blog. So a link directly to a relevant article will get more love than a generic link to your homepage. A strategy to take advantage of this knowledge is to leave comments on blogs using as the address of your web site an article link rather than a homepage link. This will be particularly useful if you are posting on Do follow blogs.
Following these tips is a good start to increasing the SEO of your blog, and they are also very good rules to follow as a blogger. Good luck with your site.
Raj
good stuff. pls post some information on improving technorati rankings, i read a lot of online moneymaking blogs but have’nt got any good idea.
Simon
@ Raj – Here is some information for you about improving your technorati rank: http://www.pingable.org/how-to-increase-technorati-rank/
Software Testing Zone
Excellent article I must say. Thanks for pointing out these simple yet powerful SEO tips for blogs.
The Monetizer
Great tips here. The direct article linking is something I don’t do enough, so will definitely start with more of that.
henrychiah
very helpful and thank for sharing.
marius
dude, i’ve been reading your blog for the last hour…what can i say? you’re magic! you managed to get all i could have been interested in, in just one place. thank you simon!
Simon
Your welcome Marius, I am glad you find my blog useful/interesting.
James from women fashion dresses
I know that the search engines like to see a sitemap, but I do not know how it effects the page rank. Good tips about writing unique articles. Thanks for sharing this information.
Technoguy
Thats a very nice article.. Thanks for letting us know about it.
seema bhatia
really valuable information for link buiding thanks
Jackie from BioGenetics
These SEO tips are really helpful for bloggers like us.. How about submitting in DMOz directory? does it help?
Robert from Free SEO Ebooks
Dmoz directory is still the most important directory on the internet. If you have a link in Dmoz, this can boost your site in SERP. But it can take a lot of time to get listed there, some time over 6 months or 1 year, depending of the category where you want to submit. But, first to request a link in Dmoz, you must to create a valuable, interesting and unique website in order to be accepted in Dmoz
Leah
Great article! I especially like #5. It takes more time, but is worth it.
I also agree with Robert above, DMOZ is still relevant to some degree since Google is still using it for Google directory results. But you need to be patient.