There is a lot of articles out there about how to optimize your blog for search engines – Google in-particularly – but this one has some pretty handy tips on SEO and promoting your blog. The key one really is to find ways to get others to link to your site – using the keywords you are targeting on your search engine.
Of course this isn’t always easy – I get emails every day from people asking me to link to them, sometimes for reciprocal links, but 99% of the time they go straight to the trash bin. People WILL link to you if you write quality content and treat them with respect and genuineness. It is also worth thinking a little creatively about this also – if you can actually provide other sites and bloggers with a service that will benefit their blog whilst still giving you a link (with your targeted wording) you can do quite well. This is why our ‘mini medal table’ at our recent Olympics Blog was so successful. We provided bloggers with a free medal table that was updated live with medals won – but the table contained around 12 links back to our site using keywords that we’d chosen such as ‘Medal Table’ which linked to our medal table page. This page was hugely successful during the games – it ranked #1 on google and because it was one of the most searched for terms those weeks we generated hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Anyway – here is the first few tips in the article:
“So do you have a product, or web service? Do you want to find ways to Search Engine Optimize your site? If you didn’t already, I suggest you do the following (or hire someone who you trust to do it for you):
Write to active blog authors. Tell them about your product, in a personal manner – to do so, you must spent around 5 minutes per blogmaster to compose a standard, personalized email. Do not spam people, as this will backfire.
Look into newsgroups and answer questions in an area where your product can help. Do not simply advertise your product in a new thread, but re-use existing ones to solve problems. Does someone ask “How can I see where my visitors come from?” and you offer statistic software, answer.
On the web site (the landing page) be straight-forward and honest about your product. Be upfront about the pricing, unless you offer your service for free. Use the inverted pyramid style of writing: most important things first, details later. Prepare a page where one can read for 30 seconds, or 30 minutes, depending on which level of detail one is looking for. Links which lead into a deeper structure are helpful. But make sure you restrict your main navigation to 10 or so important items. (Have you ever been to a product site and clicked on more than a few links?) If necessary, cluster links and break them up into two or three individual sections.”
Read more at SEO 2004
