Top tips on harnessing SEO power for your blog

Your blog can be a very powerful marketing tool when you take the necessary, yet easy, steps to ensure that it is search engine optimized. Search engines place a high importance on blogs because of its frequently updated active content. Hypothetically, the search engine is essentially fueled by the need to find new, relevant content, and therefore, blogs fundamentally provide that fresh content. You can turn your blog into a powerful force when you implement several SEO steps.

Frequent Entries

In order to receive favorable rankings from the search engines, it is important to maintain frequent blog entries and specialize on your topic. Ideally, you should post daily, or at least five times per week. The more relevant, high-quality entries you post, the more the search engines will like you. Case in point: Google has a specific “Freshbot” to crawl for new content.

Most importantly, when you have developed a pattern of regular posting, the Googlebot and other crawlers will visit your site more. The frequency the Googlebot will visit your site depends upon how frequently you change it; thus, the more you update your site, the more the Googlebot will drop in to see you. Thus, you can use your blog as an opportunity to have the Googlebot crawl your other links and sub-domains (make sure you add permanent links on the side of your blog to enjoy this benefit).

Fresh Content

As it has been emphasized in the past, content is king! For SEO purposes, as well as engaging your readers, it is important that the content you have on your website is fresh and original. Google scans for duplicate content, and if they find it, they will penalize your page rank. Therefore, make sure your content is not duplicated! There are content provider services available that will re-write content for you at a mere two cents per word. If you desire SEO for your blog, two cents is a worthy investment.

Use RSS Feeds and Ping!

Not only is it easy to create and manage RSS feeds for your blog, but it will bring you better SEO as well. When you post a new entry and have it pinged, this adds to the speed in which your pages get indexed. You can ping sites such as FeedBurner, Technocrati, OnlyWire, PingOMatic, and Pingoat to inform them that you have a new posting on your blog. In addition, you can actually ping blogsearch.google.com directly for even faster indexing. PingOMatic provides a service that helps you rapidly choose who you want to ping.

Optimizing The Details

Although your blog may only have a few relevant pages (such as home, archives, etc.), you can still take measures to optimize your blog.

Think carefully about the keywords of the title of your blog, as it gets archived and can greatly increase your SEO for search terms.

In addition, it is important to add new keyword tags and categories whenever you create a new entry. It is easier for the search engines to find your blog when you have directory structures and tags for them to digest.

There are other places on your blog where you can place SEO keywords:

• Posting titles
• Page titles
• In the beginning of each post, as well as throughout (as long as it does not overload the text or negatively alter the article’s conversational flow)
• Heading tags
• Image tags
• Outbound links
• And of course, meta tags

When you take the easy steps to give the search engine bots what they want, your blog becomes a very powerful SEO tool!