Search engine optimisation is important for a blog. Because that is, if your blog is small, the primary way to get visitors to your blog. It is evident features in blog systems such as tags and categories help towards search engine optimisation, and others as detailed below. But as many will stress, the most important thing of course is content. Content is king.
It is important to have original and unique content and that your blog is updated regularly with original and unique content. If you don’t do this, Google is simply going to give another blog better search rankings that what your blog is potentially capable of being given.
Content is king
Content is king. So what sort of content are you going to write? The thing that works for my small blogs personally is writing about something unique and that hasn’t specifically be written by blogs that are more highly-ranked than my blog is. It all helps towards search engine optimisation and of course, getting valuable visitors, which is (mostly) the reason we have blogs in the first place – if, unless of course, your blog is for your own reference only.
So, talk about something original that may not be talked about by other blogs. If your blog is on sports, why not talk about something in sports that no one else is specifically talking about right now? Perhaps your opinions on something that isn’t being talked about by another blog that is more highly-ranked.
Even though there is great competition between websites in terms of search engine optimisation because of how many websites are online and the amount of people using the Internet, if you think of the logical things you can do to help make your blog more noticeable by Google from an SEO perspective, then over time your blog will be ranked more importantly by Google bots.
Backlinks and deep links
Backlinks and deep links are important in order for Google to recognise your site as important. The obvious may well be submitting your site to relevant directories, but you can also do this by adding a link to your blog via your signature, especially on sites which you are active on.
If you often post in threads that are related to your blog’s articles or main purpose, that is definitely a practical way of getting backlinks. And where you can, try and get deep links, too. Deep links are links of inner pages within your blog, and they are just as important as backlinks of the main page of your blog.
Getting deep links is probably a little more difficult. I am sure if you post meaningful tutorials, articles or how-tos on your blog, perhaps others will link to that article if they find it interesting enough to provide a link back to it, perhaps on their own website or article on their own blog, or on a forum.
For example, if blog post is on how to fix a particular issue, someone may find your blog post via a search engine and provide a link to your blog post on a forum topic to assist a particular forum member.
There are other ways of getting deep links, too; such as link directories that accept deep links or link submissions to articles within a blog or website. This can definitely help from a search engine optimisation perspective, so definitely consider this option too.
Of course, remember that Google’s algorithms are very smart and can easily and readily detect cheating and will penalise websites that cheat in the form of search rankings or out-right removal of a website from searches altogether.
There are many easy ways of finding relevant directories to submit your blog to, including this forum of the DigitalPoint forums that allows users to advertise their own directories.
Search engine friendly URLs
Most blog systems including WordPress allow you to have search engine friendly URLs. Instead of an article ID that is part of a blog URL to refer to the article itself, it is best to have search engine friendly URLs that perhaps display the title of the article as part of the URL, for example example.com/blog/2012/20/01/blog-post-title-here.
Use tags with your blog posts
Using blog post tags do help. Add relevant tags (not too many, though) that describe what the blog post or article is about. So if I was making an article on CentOS, I’d obviously use the CentOS tag but other tags more direct to what the article is about, such as Install CentOS, etc.
I’m sure this is fairly obvious but also use categories for your blog posts. It does help from a search engine perspective.
Allow users to share your blog posts via various mediums
There are plugins for WordPress that allow you to add icons beneath each blog post allowing your readers the convenience of sharing useful blog posts with others; on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You may think, “Facebook? What?” but Google are now indexing Facebook comments!
