A focused, well-written blog can get readers hooked on the blog and promote repeat visits to the website or garner subscriptions via RSS feeds and email newsletters. These recurring communications will help to tie potential customers to your site, encourage natural link building and increase repeat visits. Journalists are also more likely to follow a blog or subscribe via RSS than to visit the corporate site repeatedly. So, several avenues of search optimization and online marketing can be addressed with a single blog entity.

From the SEO benefits of business blogging to how it can help your customers, Jeff covers the basics of “who, what and when” of blogging. Read the full article at Practical eCommerce here.

Search engines also love fresh content, and blogs, by definition, are constant sources of new content. If written correctly – or more specifically interestingly – blogs can also provide wider link bait and garner links from outside the blogosphere. Search engines, of course, reward for good, inbound links regardless of whether they’re from other blogs.

Jeff Muendel, Natural Search Analyst for Netconcepts, recommends that eCommerce sites take full advantage of WordPress, a blogging platform that offers a host of SEO-friendly options to allow for excellent search engine optimization. To read more about Jeff’s expert advice about WordPress and plug-ins, like the Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress plugin, visit the full article on Practical eCommerce.

One of the questions she covers is: Will blogging really help?

If the blog is optimally created and maintained, with a transparent, sincere voice and a commitment to using it to build relationships as well as links, then, yes, it will help. How much? That depends on how much the company is willing to invest in developing relationships with customers and prospects in the blogosphere. The only time blogging can really hurt is if the bloggers are insincere and dishonest and ignore their audience, or if your company has a god-awful online reputation in the first place. If you’re in a war of attrition over your company’s online reputation, it’s going to take a heck of a lot more than a simple blog to fix the mess you’re in.

For more about this topic, visit the full article about getting started in blogging at ClickZ.

1. Allowing title tags to be auto-generated (from the post title, category name, etc.). Every category page and most permalink pages (i.e. post pages) should be hand-crafted. Don’t just let the blog software reuse the post title or category name with your blog’s name tacked on in the front. Why? Because an ideal post title is seldom an ideal title tag. Optimizing your post title or category name by working in synonyms, multiple verb tenses, etc. into it can ruin its punchiness and thus its reader impact. For example, “Marketing on MySpace” makes for a great post title but “Social Media Marketing on MySpace, the King of Social Network Sites” makes for a title tag with broader keyword appeal.

   How would you accomplish this? If your blog is powered by WordPress, then you can use my WordPress plugin called SEO Title Tag. It even offers a “mass edit” administrative interface for making bulk edits across dozens or hundreds of pages at once. I am not aware of a similar plugin for Movable Type or other blog platforms, but perhaps this article will spur someone on to write it.

   If you don’t have the time or resources and wish to continue with auto-generated title tags, you should at an absolute minimum hand code the title tag on the home page, and then on the rest of the blog place the blog name at the end of the title tag rather than at the beginning (or remove it altogether). This will give you more uniquely focused title tags.

2. Letting pages get indexed that should never be indexed. Some pages shouldn’t be allowed into the search indices because they are either basically content-less (like the “Email this page” form or “Enlarged photo” pages) or because they are substantively similar to other pages (like the “Printer-friendly” pages). Peruse your indexed pages in Google using the site: query operator and look for which pages don’t deserve to be there. Then disallow them in your robots.txt file.
3. Having multiple homes for your blog. Does your blog have what search engine geeks refer to as “canonicalization” issues? If you can get to a page by multiple URLs, then the answer is “Yes.” For example, ries.typepad.com and www.originofbrands.com and originofbrands.com all lead to the same page.
4. Not using “optional excerpts” to minimize duplicate content. This may be known by other names in other blog platforms, but in WordPress the optional excerpt on the Write Post form is where you can define alternate copy to display everywhere but on the permalink page. That will make the content of the post unique to the permalink page, reducing the potential that you’ll lose rankings for duplicate content because the post would otherwise be included in its entirety on numerous pages, including archives-by-date pages and category pages.
5. Not using rel=nofollow to strategically direct the flow of link gain. Some internal links aren’t very helpful because they have suboptimal anchor text (e.g. “Permalink” and “Comments”). Some external links just leak link gain to nobody’s benefit, such as “Digg this” links.
6. Over-reliance on date-based archives. Most blogs organize their archives by month rather than by keyword. That’s a shame because the anchor text of links is so important to SEO, yet these date-based archives tend to have terrible number-based anchor text. Organizing your blog into categories is a step in the right direction, but implementing tagging and tag clouds across your blog is a much more search engine optimal approach. Then you can ditch your date-based hierarchy, or at least rel=nofollow all those date-based archive links.
7. No stability in keyword focus on category pages. When categories have been selected - at least in part - because of keyword research, then your category pages can be of great SEO benefit. But in order to really give those category pages the best chance at competing for their targeted keywords, the pages need stability in their keyword focus. However, in most cases the keyword focus jumps all over the place as new posts make it into that category page and old posts fall off. Using “sticky” posts which stay at the top of category page regardless of the age of that post will give you the opportunity to incorporate keyword-rich introductory copy into the pages. For example, the sticky post on the Politics category page at businessblogconsulting.com sets the stage with a keyword-rich, relevant and useful introduction to the posts within that category.
8. Suboptimal URLs. The most optimal URLs contain relevant, popular keywords and a minimal number of slashes, without any question marks. If using WordPress, be sure to change your “Permalink Options” to use rewritten URLs rather than the default of post IDs. If using TypePad or Movable Type, change from using the default of underscores to hyphens instead, as hyphens are preferred from Google’s standpoint. TypePad and Movable Type also tend to truncate URLs mid-keyword. Consider for example the post on the TypePad platform titled “Hotels, Hospitality and Social Media” which converted to a URL of http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing/2007/08/hotels-hospital.html. Note how the URL was truncated and the works “hospitality” and “social media” were lost. If using WordPress, make use of the “post slug,” to custom write the filename of the post’s URL and eliminate throwaway words from the URL such as “the” that appear in the post title but add no value in the URL.
9. Only one RSS feed, and it’s not even optimized. Each category on your blog should have its own category, so that people who are mostly interested in just one topic can subscribe to - and hopefully syndicate - the category-specific feed. Same thing applies if you have tag pages hosted on your blog. Tag-specific feeds are great for users and for SEO. Optimized RSS feeds are ones that are “full text” not summary feeds, have more than just ten items (e.g. 20 or 50), have keyword-rich item titles, incorporate your brand name in the item titles, include important keywords in the site title, and have a compelling site description.
10. Offering suboptimal podcasts. If you are publishing podcasts on your blog, be sure to optimize the ID3 tag, include show notes with each podcast, create show transcripts (hint: CastingWords offers inexpensive podcast transcription), and ensure you have a presence in podcast directories like iTunes.
11. Putting your blog’s URL or your RSS feed’s URL on a domain you don’t own. Does your blog’s URL contain blogspot.com, typepad.com, wordpress.com, etc.? If so, please repeat after me in a Homer Simpson voice: “Doh!”. This is a disaster waiting to happen. What happens if you want to move to another blog platform or service provider? You won’t be able to 301 redirect. The best you can do is put up a “We’ve moved” post then abandon the blog. Like what my daughter had to do with her Neopets blog when she moved it from neopetcheats.wordpress.com to neopetsfanatic.com. Another mistake is using Feedburner without using their MyBrand service - which means that all your RSS subscribers are subscribing to a URL you don’t control. You’d be in a pickle if you ever wanted to change from Feedburner to another service. After Google acquired Feedburner, they made the MyBrand service free. So there’s no excuse for not using it. I use MyBrand with my blog, so my feed URL is http://feeds.stephanspencer.com/scatterings instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/scatterings.
12. Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally. It’s not uncommon for bloggers to use “here” or “previously” or similar suboptimal phrases as anchor text within post copy. Resist the temptation and use relevant keywords instead.

Blogs, meanwhile, are great at attracting links from the blogosphere, because bloggers are rather cliquish and mostly tend to link to each other. So you’ll earn links as a blog that you wouldn’t normally earn otherwise.

Nonetheless, intentionally work to boost your link popularity; don’t just expect links to your blog to come on their own. One of the best ways to do this is by building relationships with bloggers by posting thoughtful comments on their blogs, by networking with them at real-world conferences like the Blog Business Summit and BlogHer, and by blogging about them. They’ll be more likely then to follow your blog and give you “hat tips” when they piggy-back on something interesting you’ve found online, and hopefully even include you on their “blogroll” (a link list of favorite blogs they read).

Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure

You pass all that hard-earned link popularity (PageRank) down through your blog’s archives through the blog’s internal hierarchical linking structure. Internal linking is one of your secret weapons, so make the most of it. Create a Top 10 list of your best posts and link to those posts from your blog’s home page. All your posts should include “Next Post” and “Previous Post” links, as well as a linked list of related posts. When writing blog posts, get in the habit of referring to any relevant old posts sitting in your archives.

Don’t use “click here” or “permalink” or “read more” in the anchor text of your internal links, because the search engines associate that underlined anchor text with the page to which you are linking. The engines will start to think all your pages are about such bizarre things as “click” or “here.” Given that, you’ll want to include important keywords in your internal links. The post’s title makes for a great anchor text, so make sure your post titles are clickable links.

Use the Neat-o tool to review the anchor text on your inbound links. Then ask your blogger friends who link to you with throwaway phrases like “click here” to change their wording.

A very powerful, somewhat advanced tactic is to provide visitors and spiders with a “tag cloud” full of keyword-rich text links that point to “tag pages” hosted on your blog. These are created automatically using a tagging plug-in like Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Importance of Title Tags

Title tags are the most important piece of text on a Web page. They’re given the most weight by search engines. So take the time to craft keyword-rich title tags for each post, category page, and of course, home page. If you must include your blog name in the title tag (not recommended), put it at the end of the title rather than at the beginning. Override the automatically generated title tags that are based on the post titles and replace them with custom-written title tags, using a blog plug-in.

URLs are very important to your blog’s rankings, too. Use “URL rewriting,” which is supported on most blog platforms, to create keyword-rich URLs that have no “stop characters” (question marks, ampersands or equals signs). Separate keywords with hyphens, not underscores, as Google doesn’t treat underscores as word separators.

Set up permanent (301 style) redirects from pages at yourblog.com to corresponding pages at www.yourblog.com, or you’ll end up with a duplicate site in the search engines. If you ever decide to switch blog platforms, maintain the old URLs through permanent redirects to preserve those valuable inbound links that point deep into your archives.

Heading tags (like H1, H2 etc.) get extra weight as opposed to regular body copy by the engines, so mark up post titles with H1 tags. Don’t mark up dates with heading tags (a fairly common mistake). On category pages, wrap the category name within an H1 tag. And on your tag pages, wrap the tag name within an H1.

Get ‘Sticky’

“Sticky” posts, which are posts that always appear at the top of the page regardless of the date, offer a clever way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page. The Adhesive plug-in will provide this “sticky” functionality to any WordPress-powered blog.

Optimize your RSS feeds too. Go with full-text feeds, not summary feeds. Provide at least 20 items in the feed, not just the default 10. Offer a range of feeds (not just one) by category, latest comments, comments by post and by tag. Have a keyword-rich title for each item, because that oftentimes will become anchor text.

For the same reason, put your most important keyword in the site’s title. Write a compelling site description because that gets displayed in various important places, such as in the “Related Blogs” results in Google Blog Search. Resist the temptation of appending a tracking code like source=rss to the URL, because it reduces the linked item’s link popularity potential. Include podcasts in your RSS feed as enclosures, as that can gain you additional visibility in podcast directories and search engines.

Stephan Spencer is president and founder of Netconcepts, a Web design and consulting firm specializing in search engine, optimal Web sites and applications. Reach him at

But MySpace is hard for many of us adults to get our heads around. It just doesn’t seem logical: How does it hold the interest of so many young people with short attention spans, despite the fact that the design/usability is so atrocious, the Web page creation platform is so frustratingly restrictive, and it’s chock full of so many profiles that are obviously fake, spam, duplicated, or abandoned?

“Um, it’s about looking cool, fitting in, and hanging out, Duh!” one might imagine a teen MySpace user answering.

Then where do us adults feature in this? Besides offering a tempting place for stalkers and voyeurs to hang out and follow the daily lives of the teenagers who haven’t made their profiles private (can you say “Creepy!”?), MySpace is host to concerned parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, college students, obsessed sports fans, and realtors. In other words, the Average Joe or Jane. MySpace is a real slice of humanity.

Of course within the MySpace ecosystem exist marketers. But most are clueless. One would expect sophisticated MySpace presences from big brand marketers. However, that is usually not the case. And generally those that are present, like Blockbuster UK, 7Eleven, and Meijer, lack key ingredients for MySpace success — like an impressive number of “Friends.”

What is probably horrifying to these brand marketers is that employees and customers think nothing of developing a MySpace presence on behalf of the company — one that may not be very flattering. Consider, for example, these unofficial MySpace pages for Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target. Undoubtedly, this leads to customer confusion, because it can be difficult to ascertain the author of a MySpace profile. And such unauthorized pages can tarnish the company’s reputation, depending on their content.

Before you leap in to MySpace as a marketer, you’d best understand it. Because if you don’t, the MySpace community can turn on you the moment you make your first misstep. Just like bloggers can. (Note: many MySpace users are bloggers too. MySpace supports blogging within its platform.) The cardinal rule in MySpace is the same one as in the blogosphere: Keep it real.

Still, despite the hazards, MySpace offers a lot promise as a venue for marketers to hawk their wares. MySpace allows you to interject yourself into existing networks of trust-based relationships and to bond with your visitors in ways not possible elsewhere on the Web. And you can interact with huge numbers of adults, not just teenagers. Surprisingly, more than half of MySpace visitors are age 35 or older, and more than two-thirds are age 25 or older, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Do you have what it takes to crack MySpace? The most unlikely of marketers seem to have it — bars, bands, and quirky dot-coms. One of my favorite examples of MySpace marketing is Project Red. Not only is Project Red a world-changing organization on a mission to defeat AIDS in Africa, its MySpace profile is attractive and engaging.

Other noteworthy examples come from Apple Computer, the Brooklyn Museum, Drumz Clothing, the Orlando Magic, the movie studio that produced Superman Returns, the comedy character Borat, and the musical artist “Weird Al” Yankovic.

A couple of these I’ve been tracking for several months, watching the size of their networks expand. First, consider Apple Computer. Its various flavors of iPod Nano have a place on MySpace, e.g. Pink Nano, which is enjoying a meteoric rise in Friend status. I started tracking Pink Nano on October 15, when it had 1,500 MySpace friends. A week later, on October 22, it had climbed to 7,449 friends. On October 27, it was up to 37,070 friends. Now, on December 3, as I write this article, it has reached 55,776. Not a bad marketing job, Apple!

Now consider the “comeback king” of musical parody — “Weird Al” Yankovic. He’s using social media quite successfully to help breathe new life into his 27-year-long music career — thanks, in no small part, to YouTube and MySpace. Yankovic told Reuters/Billboard in a recent interview that he had accumulated 155,000 MySpace friends since he joined the site in July — all of which he had personally added. He stated, “I used to be a little pickier. Now I just kind of click as fast as I can.” (I can only imagine the Repetitive Stress Injury from that much clicking!) Here’s the kicker: a week after this article came out, he was already up to 219,033 friends! Another seven days later, and Weird Al had gained another 24,000 MySpace friends (up to 243,221). Now, on December 3, it’s at 325,614!

One small company that has enjoyed a degree of success in terms of traffic and sales through MySpace is the online jewelry retailer Pugster. Its mascot, a pug dog named Pinky, is the subject of the MySpace profile—a clever move, as it puts a disarming “face” to the company. The firm built up its MySpace page to a very respectable 8,053 friends. In a recent interview with me, Michael Boldin from its online marketing team revealed some secrets of their success:

1. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer numbers on MySpace — and important to try to focus on marketing to the “right” group for your product or service — otherwise you’ll be spending a LOT of time on people who will never be interested in you.
2. But, on the other hand, when starting off, you need to get Friends. It’s kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it’ll be tough to get the good ones — the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred “bad” friends — bands are the easiest. They’ll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page — giving a little realism boost to your profile — making the addition of friends of the “good” type that much easier.
3. Where else could we find a place to actually build relationships with people — who may or may not have heard of us before. We spend time daily emailing people, and guess what, they email back. It becomes the ultimate soft-sell tool.
4. Have patience. Without a huge brand presence, don’t expect to turn profits. The only investment is your time. As long as you regularly give people something interesting — blogs, music, and other tidbits that AREN’T related to your business — then you’ll develop enough trust for them to be interested in what you DO sell.
5. Keep it personal — talk with the people as if you’d email a new friend. Say “Hi,” get to know them, and they’ll want to get to know you. If you try to sell, sell, sell, you’ll have a hard time earning respect on MySpace.
6. As far as layouts, there are a few “schools of thought” — one says make it fancy and high end, but the other, and seemingly more successful one, says simplicity is best. Since people are browsing through so many profiles with the same layout, they look for certain features in certain places. If you move too many things around, you’ll frustrate your visitors and they’ll leave. Make it intuitive and easy, just like a good e-commerce site.
7. If there’s anything a “seasoned” MySpace user hates it is a slow page. The MySpace site has loads of slow loaders. You may get friends with a lot of stuff on your page, but they won’t actually spend the time to interact with you.

You know who else gets MySpace? Site owners like this one who provide layouts, backgrounds, funny photos etc. to the MySpace community. Those folks are sitting back, sipping pina coladas and watching the moolah from Google AdSense roll in.

Blogs may be search-engine friendly out-of-the-box, but you can’t rest on your laurels. Proactively optimize your blog using the following powerful tactics.

Title Tags

From a search-engine-optimization perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. The best title tag is one that leads with the targeted keywords, not the name of the blog. Customize the title tag of your home page with good keywords, making sure they appear in the body copy, too.

Rewritten URLs

Dynamic URLs can impede search-engine spiders from fully spidering and indexing your blog. Instead, use “rewritten” URLs. The excellent (and free) blogging software WordPress supports URL rewriting. Also, WordPress URLs contain hyphens rather than underscores (underscores are not considered to be word separators by Google).

If switching blog platforms, it’s imperative that the old permalink URLs still work; you wouldn’t want to lose all that link gain from deep links into specific post pages in your blog.

Tags

Tag clouds and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon. A tagging plugin, like Ultimate Tag Warrior (neato.co.nz/ultimatetag- warrior) for WordPress, creates internal navigation based on tags and, once installed, will allow you to target new search terms by simply adding relevant keywords to the tag field in your post. Make sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy.

Related Posts

Most blogs are over-reliant on chronological archives, which tell the search engines to weight your recent posts more heavily. But an old post may be really well optimized and targeting a very important keyword. A related-posts feature on your blog creates more interconnections between blog posts and passes around more link gain.

Popular Posts

Take your very best-ever posts and compile a Top 10 Posts list to pass link gain from your blog’s home page directly to these posts so you will rank well in the search engines. Target those with your most important keywords. Or simply use a plugin like Popularity Contest for WordPress to create top 10 lists for you.

Anchor Text

Link to the blog post’s permalink URL from the post’s title to provide much better (contextual) anchor text. When writing blog posts, refer to and link to previous posts or other related content of yours (including products in your online catalog), with relevant targeted keywords in the anchor text (no “click here” links).

“Sticky” Posts

A “sticky” post that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted is an easy way to improve the keyword prominence on a category page or tag page. Having keyword-rich introduction copy that consistently appears at the top of these pages will help you maintain a stable keyword theme when old posts drop off and new ones appear.

Heading Tags

Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. Use them wisely to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme. The posting date should never be within an H1 tag; instead, wrap an H1 tag around your category name or tag name on your category page or tag page respectively.

Emphasis

Bold, strong or emphasis tags within the body copy of your blog posts will help identify to search engines which words/phrases should be given more weight.

Author Pages and Links

If you have a group blog, your authors will appreciate a link (with anchor that they specify) to each of their websites on your blog’s home page in the sidebar rather than the footer. Also provide each author with a profile page hosted on your blog, complete with a biographical statement, recent posts they’ve written, and a link to their site. WordPress supports this capability through the author.php theme file.

Here we look at five more tips to get your blog to the top of the search results.

Tip #6: Anchor Text

This one’s so basic, yet so critical, to SEO success: Make sure that within your blog template you link to the blog post’s permalink URL from the title of the post. That will provide you with much better (contextual) anchor text than the word “permalink” will.

What’s wrong with the word “permalink”? Nothing, if that’s the word you want to rank No. 1 for in the search engines!

The only thing worse than the anchor text of “Permalink” is “Click here.” (Unless of course you wish to rank tops in the search engines for “click here”!) Your anchor text (AKA link text), should contain keywords relevant to your business. The search engines associate those underlined words with the page that you’re linking to.

I’m not suggesting you remove all mentions of the word “permalink” from your blog. Rather, I’m suggesting that you augment those keyword-anemic links with keyword-rich text links. On my blog, I have two links to the permalink URL: one from the post’s title, the other at the end of the post where it says “Permalink”. (I’m presuming here that you’re already putting good keywords in the titles of your blog posts since that was the topic of my Tip #1.)

Also, when writing your blog posts, look for opportunities to refer to and link to previous posts or related content that you’ve got up on the Web. And, of course, put some thought into the anchor text you use when linking to this related content.

While you’re at it, you might as well go the extra mile and think up good anchor text when referencing customers, friends, colleagues, and business partners in your blog as well. They’ll appreciate it, and it’s good karma!

Tip #7: ‘Sticky’ Posts

A “sticky” post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. The “sticky” feature is available in some blog systems by default (e.g., Blogger.com) and in others through the use of a plugin (e.g., the Adhesive plugin for WordPress).

Why would you ever want to make a post sticky? Because it’s an easy way to improve the keyword prominence on a category page or tag page. If you’re not familiar with the concept of keyword prominence, it’s simply this: The higher up on the page your targeted keyword is, the better you’ll rank. So having keyword-rich intro copy that consistently appears at the top of a category page or a tag page will give you good keyword prominence and help you maintain a stable keyword theme for the page, even when old posts fall off the page and new posts appear.

You can achieve this with a blog post containing your desired keyword-rich intro copy, categorizing/tagging it so that it appears on the desired page and making the post “sticky” so that it stays on the top of the tag page. Back-date the post so it doesn’t appear on the top of your home page, just on the appropriate category or tag page.

With the Adhesive plugin, you should select the “Show Sticky Posts Only on Category Pages” option in the configuration settings to ensure that they never appear on the home page. If you’re also using UltimateTagWarrior to create tag pages, you’ll need to edit the following line (which appears twice) in the Adhesive plugin…

from:

if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category())

to:

if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category() || is_tag())

If you aren’t able to make posts sticky for whatever reason, then a kludge to still get the desired effect would be to put your intro copy directly into your template/theme and use a series of if/then statements to determine which copy to display based on which category/tag is active.

Tip #8: Heading Tags

Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme.

The posting date should never be within an H1 tag, because you’re NOT trying to rank well in the engines for a date. Instead, wrap an H1 tag around your category name or tag name on your category page or tag page, respectively.

Then make the titles of your blog posts H2 tags, so that on a category or tag page the category/tag words can be the only H1 on the page and thus can convey greater emphasis than the post titles.

You could even take this idea a step further and make the post title display within an H1 tag if it’s a Sticky post, and within an H2 if a normal post.

Tip #9: Emphasis Within Your Posts

Using bold, strong, or emphasis tags within the body copy of your blog posts will help identify to search engines like Yahoo which words/phrases should be given more weight.

Feel free to emphasize multiple phrases in your copy. Even make use of Heading tags if your post is particularly long. Just don’t overdue it. If it seems overoptimized when you read it, then it is!

Tip #10 (for Multi-Author Blogs): Pages and Links for the Authors

If you’ve got a multi-author blog and those bloggers have their own independent Web sites, they’ll probably want and appreciate getting links from you.

Include links to all your author’s Web sites in your sidebar rather than at the bottom of your page, because footer links don’t get as much weight by the search engines. Or, better yet, only include your list of author links from the homepage rather than making it a site-wide link, which will also get partially discounted by the search engines.

Within every post that they author, include a link to their site. That will motivate them to post more often.

Also include with each post a link to their profile page (hosted on your blog). Each author profile page should contain a link to that author’s site, a biographical statement (taken from the “About Yourself” field in their profile, for instance), and the posts that they’ve authored. You can see my profile page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com, for example, at http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/author/stephan-spencer/.

Let the authors define the anchor text of the link to their site, since anchor text is such an important element for SEO (see Tip #6, above). The way I did it for BusinessBlogConsulting.com, which runs on WordPress, was this: I had the authors specify the anchor text they wanted in the Nickname field on their edit profile page and I used that instead of their name.

In Summary

Search engines love blogs. Right out of the gate your blog has an advantage in the search engines over traditional websites. But don’t rest on your laurels; you must fine-tune your blog using the 10 tactics discussed in order to maximize the search engine opportunity. Good luck! I expect to see you up there real soon.

But with over 75,000 new blogs created every single day, and tens of millions of blogs already in the blogosphere, it’s not a given that you’ll get found by your target audience and develop a loyal following of readers (case in point: the MarketingProfs “Daily Fix” blog and its quest for greater visibility.)

What can you do to pull in the crowds and to rise in the rankings? Read on and I’ll share my secrets.

Search Engines Love Blogs
You may recall from my article in November, “The Secrets of Building Links and Increasing PageRank,” that the major search engines all rely heavily on links to decide which Web sites are worthy of a top ranking. Blogs are looked on quite favorably in that regard, because the blogosphere is so rich with interlinkages. Bloggers link to each other constantly—from blogrolls, to trackbacks, to “hat tips.” Accordingly, blogs seem to get special treatment, particularly from Google.

Starting with just a few good links, a new blog can quickly penetrate Google’s top results where a brand new, traditional Web site might languish in the “Google sandbox” for a number of months with very poor visibility. Case in point: my 14-year-old daughter recently started a blog, Ultimate Neopets Cheats (about the hugely popular kids site Neopets.com), and within two weeks achieved a page-one ranking in Google for her targeted search terms of “Neopet cheats” and “Neopets cheats.”

Blogs also get indexed by blog-specific (and RSS feed-specific) search engine—like Technorati, Feedster, PubSub, Google Blog Search, and Yahoo News & Blog Search. But to blog owners, these specialized search sites are small potatoes in terms of traffic generation, because their reach and search volume is a small fraction of what is achieved by the major engines.

So the focus of this article will be on obtaining traffic and visibility from the major engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. After all, with most people turning to Google and Yahoo—does it really matter that you are number one in Technorati or Google Blog Search for a particular keyword?

So, without any further ado, I offer you 10 key tips that will help your blog soar in the major search engines. This week, I offer the first five; next week, the balance.

Tip #1: Your Title Tags
From a search engine optimization perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. It gets the most weight by the search engines. Most blogs don’t have search engine optimal title tags. (Heck, most sites in general don’t have optimal title tags!)

The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. But, unfortunately, most blogs lead with the name of the blog. Instead, that should go at the end.

We recently did some optimization to BusinessBlogConsulting.com and I’m happy to say that’s now the case there: the blog name is at the end.

In addition, it’s good to customize the title tag of your home page to have some good keywords in them. For BusinessBlogConsulting.com, that meant including phrases like “corporate blogs” and “business blogging,” and including both singular and plural forms “blog” and “blogs,” as well as the verb tense “blogging.” (The old title tag was “Business Blog Consulting.” Now it’s “Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging.”)

Creating a custom title tag for your blog’s home page is well worth doing. Consider this: On my blog, Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings, I decided to target the search phrase “web marketing blog.” By simply changing the home page title tag from “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings” to “Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog” and adding a mention of “Web marketing blog” once in the body copy, I went from nowhere for “Web marketing blog” in Google to currently #9 out of 166,000,000!

Of course, make sure that the keywords you are targeting aren’t just in the title tag but also in the body copy as well. Otherwise, it’s not reinforcing your keyword focus to the search engines sufficiently. On BusinessBlogConsulting.com we simply added “corporate blogs” to the home page title and once to the body copy, and within short order it went from nowhere in Google to page 2 (currently ranked at No. 11) for “corporate blogs.” Not bad for a couple of minutes of effort! (Read on to Tip No. 3 to see exactly how we did this within WordPress.)

Tip #2: Your URLs
Dynamic URLs can impede the search engine spiders from fully spidering and indexing your blog. Err on the side of caution and use “rewritten” URLs.

The excellent (and free!) blogging software WordPress supports URL rewriting, so you can have nice, search engine friendly URLs. Better still, the WordPress URLs contain hyphens rather than underscores (which TypePad and Movable Type employ), since underscores are not considered to be word separators by Google.

If you ever switch blog platforms, it’s imperative that the old permalink URLs still work. That’s because there will be numerous deep links into specific post pages in your blog from other bloggers, and that provides your blog with that all-important “link gain” (e.g. Google’s PageRank). You wouldn’t want to lose that!

Recently I assisted BusinessBlogConsulting.com with the conversion from TypePad to WordPress 2.0. As part of the migration, I ensured that the new WordPress permalink URLs would be consistent with the old TypePad permalink URLs. That means that the old posts still have underscores in them.

However, for new posts, the permalink URLs contain full words and hyphens, not underscores.

If for some reason you have to change the URLs, then at least redirect the old URLs to the new ones, and make sure that you do it as a permanent (301 style) redirect. That way, the link gain passes on to the new URL.

Also, make sure you 301 redirect requests for pages from your domain without the www (e.g., http://businessblogconsulting.com/category/adverblogs/) to the corresponding page on your www URL (e.g., http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/category/adverblogs/). This will eliminate duplicate pages in the search engine indices and consolidate link gain.

Otherwise, when people link to http://businessblogconsulting.com without the www, it creates another site for the search engines to visit and explore. The Permalink Redirect WordPress plugin is the easiest way to accomplish this for blogs running the WordPress software.

Tip #3: Tagging
I can’t believe how few bloggers take advantage of tags. I’m not talking about Technorati tags—although those are useful for SEO, too, since Technorati tag pages often rank in the first page of Google. I’m talking about using a tagging plugin (like Ultimate Tag Warrior for WordPress) that creates internal navigation based on tags (i.e., a “tag cloud”) and blog archive pages organized not by date or by category but by tag. A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon.

Once such a plugin is installed, if I want to target a new search term in the search engines, I simply add some relevant keywords to the Tag field in my post. Then, presto! I’ve got text links in my blog’s tag cloud that point to a new, automatically created tag page.

And, of course, make sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy! For those blogs on WordPress, here’s an example of the sort of code you’d put into your theme’s header to accomplish that:

<title><?php if (is_home()) { print "Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging."; }elseif (is_tag()) { UTW_ShowCurrentTagSet("", "%tagdisplay%"); print " : "; bloginfo('name'); } else { wp_title(' '); print " : "; bloginfo('name'); } ?></title>

You can further optimize the tag pages by adding some keyword-rich intro copy to each tag page, but that involves the use of “sticky” posts, which I’ll get to in Part 2 of this article series.

Tip #4: Related Posts
Having a Related Posts feature on your blog creates more interconnections between blog posts, which is a good thing as it passes around more link gain. I installed the Related Entries plugin on my blog so readers are able to see that each permalink page lists related posts at the bottom of the page.

Most blogs are over-reliant on the chronological archives, which tells the search engines to weight your recent posts more heavily. But an old post may be really well optimized and targeting a really important keyword. So that post needs more link gain, and that means more links pointing to that page and links from pages higher up in the site hierarchy.

Linking to related posts creates an alternative linking structure to augment your chronological archives.

Tip #5: Popular Posts

Wouldn’t it make sense to take your very best posts, regardless of posting date, and endow them with a maximum amount of link gain so that they have the most opportunity to rank well in the search engines? Putting together a Top 10 Posts list for your homepage will do exactly that, by strategically passing link gain from your blog’s homepage directly to these posts.

The great thing about a Top 10 list is that you can be as arbitrary as you want in determining which posts get onto this list. It could be the ones that lead with your most important keywords. Or the ones that most effectively soft sell your products or services. Or simply the posts you personally like the most. Just be careful to choose “evergreen” posts that won’t lose their appeal or value after a few days or weeks.

If you’re happy to leave it up to your readers to decide, then simply install a “most popular posts” plugin such as the Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress. The plugin automatically compiles the list based on which posts get viewed the most. You can publish the list on the home page and wherever else you see fit.

Continue to Part 2, the second and final installment, when we look at anchor text, “sticky” posts, heading tags, emphasis tags, and author pages…