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.