Optimizing Your Blog

WordPress SEO Presentation at A4UExpo London from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

Tonight I watched a couple of videos about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for bloggers. Let me fill you in, because I'm sure some of you are thinking SE-what? SEO is the process of using targeted keywords, relevant content, tags and other digital assets (audio, podcasting anything you can put on or in a blog) to make pages more readable to search engines, therefore making the site rank well in the search engines.

Ranking well means, coming up on the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing (etc.) when a person searches for a subject that you have written, talked, video blogged about. Everyone wants to come up on that first page, because really when was the last time you searched through to page 14 of search results?

I have learned that there are some very specific things a blogger can do to optimize their blog. Check this out:

Let’s start with the basics. Blogs with images, interactive elements, and some multimedia are dynamic. Blogs with just plain text and nothing else are not. Plus all these elements help search engines to find you. For example if you write about cats, Google will find you. But if you put a video of a cat doing cat stuff, and you write about the cat doing cat stuff; Google will find you faster.

It is also important to pay attention to the navigation on your blog. Past posts should be archived in a simple and easy to find way, by category and date. Adding elements like “Most Popular Posts” and “Most Recent” help your audience find content that has already been popular, as well as keep up with your new posts.

Blog about topics people are interested in. That is not to say that you should totally abandon the things your interested in. It really means that if you have created a niche audience, you don’t want to alienate them. Today, I learned more about some great tools that help you keep abreast of what’s hot online. You can track memes with Techmeme and TailRank, and you can see what people are looking for on Google Trends or Yahoo Buzz Index.

Get social! Traditional SEO will help, but social media optimization (That’s when you get on Facebook and Twitter and post on Forums etc.) will supercharge your blog ranking, so when some one searches about cats doing cat stuff, your blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter and some posts you wrote in forums about the cats will all pop up too.

I almost forgot the tags! You should always, always, and did I say always tag (label) your posts. Tagging your posts can help search engines find you as well. So if the title of your post is "I Hate the City Bus", but within the body you write about also hating the subway and how cabbies try to rip you off, if you put the tags/labels as hate, bus, subway, cabs, ripoff; then anyone searching for those words can still find your blog about the City Bus.

Finally, check your analytics. If you are using Blogger that's the tab that says "Stats". This gives you information about what country people are from who are viewing your blog, how many unique visits you have, as well as through what channel (Google, link from another blog, Twitter, Facebook etc.) It is an awesome resource, so use it!

I hope this helps out my fellow bloggers. Oh and enjoy this cat doing cat stuff.