March 17, 2006
Welcome to part three of this mini-series on SEO and blogging. We're going to cover several more tips on how to get search engines to pay attention to your blog more. Remember that a blog can be used for numerous areas of your business and has enormous strengths in some very specific areas. For example it is becoming almost indespensible to those corporations who use it for customer service. Get started on one as soon as you can, you'll never regret it!
Now let's get into some more tips that will get your blog noticed.
1. Right amount of content.
A lot of bloggers I have noticed can go from extremes of a sentence or two all the way up to full-blown articles that are as long as 1500 words. Neither of these work very good for a blog. Now I probably read as much material in a day as anyone out there, but if I see either one of these situations on a blog, I usually don't even take a second look, I just go on.
The great majority of writing needs to be in the 200-300 word range. Not only in blogs, but in a lot of areas of online business, this is the tested rule of thumb. It is much better to write what you have to say over several posts (like I'm doing in this little series) than to post long essay-like writings.
2. Update continuously.
Spiders are much more apt to be sent to a blog that is updated frequently, than one that is posted on irregularly. Also if your posting time-sensitive material, you will benefit from the quicker indexing because you can be listed within hours instead of possibly days.
3. Important Outbound links.
In the past there has been reasons to be reluctant to give away links to other sites. The first being the obvious of leading your own visitors away. But in the past you were also leading the value of your PageRank away to an external domain. PageRank is Google's way of measuring the popularity of your link. This is no longer true. Now your outbound links are considered an asset to your blog site. People also like to come back to those who can offer links so that they don't have to go through the trouble of finding them all.
4. RSS and blog directories.
This is one of the fastest strategies to get your inbound links to grow quickly. It's a great spider helper that will benefit your blog. If you try the old search engine submission avenue with your blog, in most cases you'll be pretty disappointed with the results. This is the way to get good, solid inbound links, which will result in your blog being indexed in a few days.
Can you see how SEO doesn't have to be rocket science? What is great about these tips is if you really follow through with them, you'll find that they will empower you to get good rankings for your blog in the search engines.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
