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

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…

Blogging is one of the hottest trends on the net. A blog (short for “web log”) is a web-based diary where the author can ruminate on whatever strikes his or her fancy. The blogger may share photos, poetry, political views, gossip, industry trends, business advice, or the latest on their personal life. By definition, blogs are organized in reverse chronological order. Many are updated daily. They can have one or multiple authors, such as a community blog.

One in five teens between 12 and 17 maintains a blog, according to a US survey. But blogs aren’t just for idiosyncratic rants by awkward adolescents. Seemingly everybody is getting into blogging - celebrities like William Shatner, gurus like Tom Peters, and world-renowned journalists like Dave Barry. And yes, the business world too is embracing blogs - from corporate giants like General Motors to small but stand-out businesses like the Savile Row tailor Thomas Mahon. I’ve caught the bug too; I blog on emarketing and search engine optimization at www.StephanSpencer.com.

Why are people reading blogs?
A new blog is created every 5.8 seconds (Source: Pew). Not surprisingly, many of the millions of blogs littering the Web are not meant for public consumption beyond a small circle of friends or colleagues. Business bloggers, on the other hand, target a wider audience consisting of current and prospective customers, catering to their wants and needs with useful info or insightful commentary on a regular basis. Readers grow to depend on the blogger’s observations and wisdom.

Marketing guru and celebrated business blogger Seth Godin reckons there are three types of business blogs: “news blogs” which follow the latest happenings in a particular topic area, “writer’s blogs” where the blogger mostly riffs and pontificates, and “our blogs” which are merely fire-starters for conversations carried on within the blog by the community of blog readers.

News blogs keep readers up to date with news and current events in their areas of expertise or interest, only pointing out the best or most interesting stuff. Thus, bloggers whom you trust and resonate with can be a real timesaver by acting as a personal filter, cutting through the information glut. Writers’ blogs stimulate the reader’s thinking and challenge his or her preconceptions. “Our blogs” provide the reader with the impetus to join a conversation on issues that the reader cares about. In effect, it’s participatory journalism.

To blog, or not to blog?
Curiously, brands are notably absent from the “blogosphere” - the blogging world online. By lagging behind on this new trend, they miss a key opportunity to actively participate in the global online conversation that is currently happening without them.

Consider, for example, Pepsi’s “Pop the Music” Superbowl ad. The commercial inadvertently made a star out of Mandy Amano, a woman who appeared in the commercial for only a few seconds. Geeks the world over swooned over her. One of them rose to the occasion and started a blog in her honor, called That Pepsi Girl (http://thatpepsigirl.blogspot.com/). The blog is a testament to the power of the consumer to initiate fads and influence their spread. Where was Pepsi through all this? Not in the blogosphere, that’s for sure. But they should have been.

How about dotcom brands? They too seem reticent to join in. For instance, wine.com does not have a blog. Therefore, wine enthusiasts flock to wine blogs like Vinography for their daily dose of news and opinion, rather than a wine.com blog. Where does wine.com figure in to Vinography’s many hundreds of posts? Unfortunately, a mere four times, and those few mentions aren’t all favorable. A wine.com blog, full of passion for wine and devoid of disguised advertorial, would over time develop a loyal following and be in a position to influence their readers’ buying decisions.

Here are three reasons to add blogging to your own marketing arsenal:

• You’ll be seen as an expert in your niche. If your blog is a good one, you build credibility with your readers and they come to rely on you for the latest thinking, news and trends in your field of expertise or interest. It’s as if you become the lens with which the reader views the greater Web. Then, as their thought leader, you can influence the reader through a soft sell approach. Furthermore, a blog draws in the visitor, making him or her want to return again and again to see what new stuff has been posted.
• People regard you as a human being they can relate to. The personal voice of your blog is more “real” than the voice of your company’s site; it’s more disarming and makes your company seem more approachable. People buy from people, not from some faceless corporate entity. It also gives customers an inside-view of how you think, your unadulterated opinions and point of view.
• Search engines love blogs. Links are the currency of the Web as far as the search engines are concerned. A good blog garners links - in quantity and quality - yielding higher search engine rankings. No links equals no visibility in the natural (unpaid) search results, so links really are critical. Bloggers link extensively to each other within their blog posts, within their “blogrolls” (i.e. favorite blogs that they read regularly), and through a blogging feature called “trackbacks.” Blog posts are also syndicated onto other sites via a technology called RSS (for Really Simple Syndication).

But can blogging have a positive impact on your bottom line? Absolutely, if it’s done right! Just consider the success story of the Voltaic Backpack, as described in an article in Fortune magazine earlier this year. Entrepreneur Shayne McQuade received an early sample of his company’s solar-powered backpack that can charge the wearer’s cell phone and other gadgets. He asked a friend - a blogger who runs a blog called Treehugger - to blog about it, and he did. The mention on Treehugger, being just a small blog with a small readership, didn’t by itself cause a huge word-of-mouth epidemic to spread. However, another blogger higher up the blogging “ecosystem” picked up the story from Treehugger and blogged about the backpack on his Cool Hunting blog, which was then read by Gizmodo, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet for cool stuff and gadgets. Once the backpack was featured on Gizmodo, the orders literally poured in!

Here are a few more examples of blogs that have driven customers, interest and sales:

• Last year Steve Spangler, founder and CEO of specialty catalog company Steve Spangler Science, launched an entertaining and educational blog at www.stevespangler.com which already has a Google PageRank importance score on par with the home page of the company’s online retail site. The blog is effectively driving traffic and sales into the online store and is further positioning Steve as a thought leader in childhood education.
• The Carter Center garnered significant increases in visits to their site after a short blogging stint in 2003 by President Jimmy Carter (instigated on my suggestion). The Center enjoyed, on average, quadruple their normal daily visitors and have sustained significant increase in Web traffic since then.
• Step Two Designs’ managing director James Robertson writes a blog called Column Two, which has become his company’s top client referral source. The blog, along with a compendium of his articles, accounts for 75% of new leads. Over the course of the first year of the blog’s existence (the blog was launched in April 2002), web traffic went from 200 visitors a day to over 1500. Repeat visits per month quadrupled. Robertson reckons blogging has been “the best online marketing I’ve ever done”.

A key point for brand marketers: word-of-mouth plays a critical role in people’s purchase decisions both online and offline. People look to mavens that they trust for product recommendations. If you could be in that influential position of one of those mavens that they trust because they follow your blog, then you can influence their positions/choices.

But also there is a real risk in not being part of the conversation. Case in point: Kryptonite Locks. It was discovered that their bike locks could be picked with an ordinary Bic pen, and this discovery made its way through the blogosphere while Kryptonite remained silent. The negative word-of-mouth continued to escalate until finally Kryptonite was forced to act, albeit too late to effectively contain the damage. By the end of it, it cost the Ingersoll-Rand subsidiary $10 million in recall costs - over a third of its annual revenue.

Seth Godin said at a recent MarketingProfs’ Thought Leaders Summit on business blogging: “What I think blogs can do that’s really powerful, is change the culture of an idea and the way a corporate sees itself. It’s about very specific vertical groups listening to a human being within a company so that they can hear the story behind that company - the story that the corporate needs and wants to tell. And if the stories are good and the ideas are worth spreading, they’ll spread.” Do you have a story to tell?

Getting started
Now that I have your attention, if you plan on writing a blog, follow these tips:

• Write blog posts as interesting links augmented with your own brief commentary, not in-depth articles or bland corporate-speak or, heaven forbid, press releases. Employ a conversational tone. Let your opinion shine through.
• Encourage audience participation by allowing readers to comment on blog posts.
• Update your blog frequently. Aim for at least a few posts per week. The more the better. This garners repeat visits and improved search engine visibility. Search engines like recent content.
• Use a blogging service or software. Hosted services abound, like Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com and Typepad.com. Or you can install blogging software on your web server, such as WordPress or Moveable Type, integrating it within the rest of your site. A blogging tool makes maintaining your blog a breeze. Most of them by default provide an “RSS feed” so people can siphon off your blog updates automatically using news aggregator software. On the road? Many of these tools also allow you to post audio messages and photos to your blog from your cell phone.
• Provide multiple paths to your posts. Offer a search engine so people can dig through old posts, and categories so people can see all the topics that interest them. Even consider adding a Top 10 list of your all-time best blog posts on your home page.
• Register with various blog directories and participate in blogger communities. The sooner you get into sites like Technorati, Daypop, and Blog Universe, is the sooner they start referring traffic to your blog and increasing its search engine visibility through links.
• Have an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. In fact, have multiple feeds, for each category. With RSS, people are not just subscribed to your blog. In many cases they’re subscribed to searches (e.g. through a free service like PubSub or Feedster). And so, if they’re subscribed to a search about a topic, all of a sudden, anybody who is interested in that topic can read your blog, as long as the keywords they are searching for appear in your blog post. Be sure to track subscribers, reads and click-throughs on the RSS feed. More on RSS in a future article.
• Allow readers to subscribe to blog updates via email. Many people are still not very savvy about RSS, so email provides a mechanism for them to follow your blog in a way they understand.
• Don’t be afraid to enlist some help. It takes skill as a writer and a storyteller to be an effective blogger. Consider engaging a blog consultant to help you find your right voice and learn blogging best practices. You may even want to engage a professional blogger to help you research topics and draft posts. Whatever you do, be transparent. Don’t try to fool your readers into thinking you are writing when it’s actually the voice of a ghostwriter.
• Exercise good judgment. Obviously the rules of business propriety apply just as much in the blogosphere as elsewhere. Don’t leak confidential information, misrepresent your company, say anything libelous or slanderous, and so on. Credit your sources and link to them.

Blogging is a tool, one that requires skill and practice to be wielded effectively. Debbie Weil described blogging well when she said at the above-mentioned Thought Leaders Summit: “It’s a way to tell a story with a voice, with an opinion, with context, with links to others. It’s immediate. It’s fresh. It’s happening now. A lot of this is not obvious to companies getting into blogging for the first time.”

Exciting times ahead
Blogging isn’t just a passing fad; it’s here to stay. Nothing underlines that more than Google’s acquisition of Blogger.com, a service that hosts over 200,000 active blogs and claims over 1,000,000 users.

Blogging is becoming an established communications channel in business. Business blogger and author Shel Israel predicts that the power of people to reach real humans inside the corporation will have a liberating effect. In the end, he says, marketing departments as we know them will be reconfigured to some degree.

Steve Rubel, PR guru and author of the Micropersuasion blog, predicts that blogging will eventually bring the end of corporate-speak because it whets people’s appetite for things that are written in a human voice. The heavy corporate style - like “such-and-such a company today announced.” is going to disappear because people want a human voice with credibility.

BL Ochman, of whatsnextonline.com, points out that one of the things so annoying about the Internet today is going to websites and you can’t find a human anywhere. In the blogosphere, you find humans. And while a lot of retailers may pull back, asking “what would we do with all that feedback” or “what are we going to do when all those people start responding to our blogs”, some may seize this opportunity and discover something very exciting and powerful - namely, that their words really can have an impact. BL says, “That’s going to be one of the bigger changes that companies will have to deal with, and it’s a very positive change that’s going to come about, all because of blogging!”

Webfeeds — XML files containing a list of late-breaking content items — also have a positive effect on search rankings by encouraging additional inbound linking. These could be blog posts, news headlines, new or best-selling products, clearance items, etc.

A feed will be in either the Really Simple Syndication standard or the ATOM standard and typically contains information such as titles, descriptions, Web addresses and publication dates.

By providing one or more feeds on your Web site, you can get syndicated onto other sites that wish to use your content to augment their own. This will result in deep links into your pages of late-breaking content. For example, Slashdot.org has news headlines and associated links syndicated onto numerous other Web sites, including Nanodot.org.

What is it about links that make them so crucial to search engine optimization? From the engines’ perspective, links connote importance. In a way, a link acts like a vote. A Web site with few inbound links won’t appear to the search engines to be worthy of a top ranking for any popular search keywords.

Not all links are created equal, either. A link from Jim-Bob’s personal home page won’t benefit nearly as much as a link from CNN.com. Furthermore, the anchor (i.e. underlined) text in links gets special consideration by the search engines: the keywords in that anchor text are associated with the page that is linked to. That’s why a search for “miserable failure” returns such politically charged results, even though the words “miserable” and “failure” appear nowhere on the HTML of those top-ranking pages.

Two great ways to acquire links with keyword-rich anchor text are blogging and syndicating your content through Webfeeds. It starts with naming your blog with your targeted keywords. Incorporating keywords into the titles of your blog posts and the titles of your RSS items also will yield a rankings benefit.

Over time, the major engines are going to use Webfeed technology in more sophisticated ways. Yahoo currently offers a Web-based aggregator called My Yahoo that you can add RSS feeds to with one click, using the “Add to My Yahoo” link that appears in some listings in the Yahoo search results.

MSN Search lets you subscribe to search results as RSS feeds. Some specialized feed search engines like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub let you subscribe to an RSS feed of search results that pull data from an index of Webfeeds, but I’m confident the major engines will offer the same sort of functionality.