The 6 Key Principles of SEO for Your Blog

It goes without saying that search engine optimization is just as important for blogs as it is for websites. However, fortunately, blogs integrate software that pings search engines to inform them of new content, and consequently, blogs are usually crawled a lot more often than a static site.

When you are considering SEO for blogs, you’ll need to think of employing numerous on-site techniques so that search engines can discover your content. The critical piece is keyword-rich content. Beyond that, make some considerations for:

1. Usability and ease of navigation: Make it easy for your readers to access the various parts of your page without

difficulty. Be sure to add important information in visible areas. One mistake often seen with blogs and blog designs is the lack of a “Previous Posts” or “Next Posts” link on the bottom of the page. It makes sense to flesh out all these details as soon as possible.

2. Regular content updates: Search engines crawl websites more often if they are frequently updated. Content updates are user-friendly as well – readers have a reason to keep returning to the site.

3. Creation of XML sitemaps for search engines (and HTML sitemaps for user navigation): An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of URLs that informs search engines when new content becomes available. You can also put numeric values to indicate weight/priority on specific content. When content gets updated, your XML file is updated. As long as you register your sitemap with the various search engines, the search engine spiders will discover new content by looking at your sitemap file. Adding an XML sitemap is usually easy with numerous plugins available for blog platforms.

4. Duplicate content: Your category pages may have the same exact content as your monthly archives. If this is the case, be sure to employ rules (such as in robots.txt) to filter out the duplicate content. For example, in the case of WordPress, you may want to add rules to disallow crawling of category page. This ensures that search engines find the proper page (typically the main page) and crawls that (and indexes it) instead.

5. Linking (both internally and externally): Link to your important pages internally, and use appropriate anchor text to direct your readers (and search engines) to content that you feel is important. Link externally to diversify your content and link to other recommended sources for information. For example, if you are talking about search engine optimization and have a page dedicated to SEO on your site, you may want to link to your SEO page (internal linking). But if you want to talk about social media marketing and don’t have a relevant page on your site, you might want to point your readers to a better authority source on another website (external linking). Also, when employing linking techniques, use appropriate and descriptive anchor text, not “click here” to pass the best link value to these pages.

6. Choosing a name that is easy to remember: Like any website or brand name, your blog should not be difficult to remember (see #3). Keep it simple.

Four Elements blog is your daily source of news, tips and trends for web 2.0, search engine optimization and our future web. We help entrepreneurs and business owners correctly integrate emerging technology. Four Elements helps clients succeed, in all economic climates, through personalized integration of social networks, social media, blogs, widgets, wikis, cloud computing, search engine optimization, social bookmarks, web tools and mobile technology.

Link to original post

Related articles by Zemanta

• 8 New Plug-ins Every New Blog Should Have (howtospoter.com)
• Get To The Number One Position On Google (ronmedlin.com)

Tagged as: Search engine optimization