Search engine optimization for a blog is generally different from your normal run of the mill website but it is also very important that bloggers get the fundamentals of SEO right if they want to target free organic traffic from the search engines. Blogs are social in nature which enables them to build links more naturally than a static website. Writing one very popular post can create hundreds or even thousands of links for your site in a very short space of time, getting this kind of popularity is naturally more difficult with a static website. A large portion of people who read blogs also write them as well.
If you write quality unique content on your blog and are able to generate fresh ideas related to hot topics of the moment then the links you can obtain can help boost your sites SEO by itself. But like I said it is also important to get the fundamentals right as well. If you're on a free hosted blog with the likes of Blogger.com or WordPress.com then I highly recommend you make the small investment of establishing you own self hosted blog with its own domain. You can purchase a domain name from GoDaddy.com for less than $10 and you can get shared web hosting for your blog for less than $10 per month from the like of hostgator.com or Dreamhost.com. If you haven't got the option of hosting your own then stick with Blogger.com, at least then you'll be able to make some money in the future as they allow Adsense and affiliate links.
The most search engine friendly blog platform to use is WordPress which you can download from WordPress.org for free. If you get web hosting through Hostgator or Dreamhost you'll be able to install WordPress using Fantastico's one click install meaning you'll be ready to go in seconds. Assuming you have taken my advice and set-up a WordPress blog on your own domain you'll also need to install some plugins and change your permalink structure to make your site more search engine friendly. Changing your permalink structure is very simple, just go to options, then permalinks. From there add /%postname%/ into the "custom structure" field and select "Update Permalink Structure".
The most important plugins to install to make your WordPress blog search engine friendly are the All In One SEO Pack (Generate search engine friendly page titles, adds keyword and descr i ption meta tags), Google XML Sitemaps (Generates an XML sitemap which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo), Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (Generates a fully customizable HTML sitemap) and Similar Posts (Adds similar posts to your posts pages helping spread link popularity).
Once your blog and has been set-up to be SEO friendly you'll now be ready to start writing your posts. It's important to decide what the main keywords are that you want to focus on targeting. Try not to focus on more than 2-3 general topics (keywords) and develop a list of more focused keywords or keyphrases related to your topics. You can use a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to help you with this. Once you have developed a nice list of keywords that you want to target you can start writing posts incorporating these keywords, in the titles and within the posts body. Over time with more and more posts you will be building keyword authority for these keywords. It is also a good idea linking all your pages back to your home page using your blogs main keyword as the anchor text. I accomplish this by adding the link to my blogs footer.
Author : Paul C Walton
Source : http://www.ezinearticles.com
If you write quality unique content on your blog and are able to generate fresh ideas related to hot topics of the moment then the links you can obtain can help boost your sites SEO by itself. But like I said it is also important to get the fundamentals right as well. If you're on a free hosted blog with the likes of Blogger.com or WordPress.com then I highly recommend you make the small investment of establishing you own self hosted blog with its own domain. You can purchase a domain name from GoDaddy.com for less than $10 and you can get shared web hosting for your blog for less than $10 per month from the like of hostgator.com or Dreamhost.com. If you haven't got the option of hosting your own then stick with Blogger.com, at least then you'll be able to make some money in the future as they allow Adsense and affiliate links.
The most search engine friendly blog platform to use is WordPress which you can download from WordPress.org for free. If you get web hosting through Hostgator or Dreamhost you'll be able to install WordPress using Fantastico's one click install meaning you'll be ready to go in seconds. Assuming you have taken my advice and set-up a WordPress blog on your own domain you'll also need to install some plugins and change your permalink structure to make your site more search engine friendly. Changing your permalink structure is very simple, just go to options, then permalinks. From there add /%postname%/ into the "custom structure" field and select "Update Permalink Structure".
The most important plugins to install to make your WordPress blog search engine friendly are the All In One SEO Pack (Generate search engine friendly page titles, adds keyword and descr i ption meta tags), Google XML Sitemaps (Generates an XML sitemap which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo), Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (Generates a fully customizable HTML sitemap) and Similar Posts (Adds similar posts to your posts pages helping spread link popularity).
Once your blog and has been set-up to be SEO friendly you'll now be ready to start writing your posts. It's important to decide what the main keywords are that you want to focus on targeting. Try not to focus on more than 2-3 general topics (keywords) and develop a list of more focused keywords or keyphrases related to your topics. You can use a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to help you with this. Once you have developed a nice list of keywords that you want to target you can start writing posts incorporating these keywords, in the titles and within the posts body. Over time with more and more posts you will be building keyword authority for these keywords. It is also a good idea linking all your pages back to your home page using your blogs main keyword as the anchor text. I accomplish this by adding the link to my blogs footer.
Author : Paul C Walton
Source : http://www.ezinearticles.com
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