Everyone and their dog (yes, there are a few dogs out there with their own blogs) have started up a blog these days, but many people just aren't taking the steps needed to optimize their blogs for both readers and search engines. While blogs can be business related (another blog about mesothelioma anyone?) they can also be personal where you talk about the great ham sandwich you had for lunch today or the crappy service you had at that trendy restaurant last night.
But whether your blog is business or personal, you should ensure that you are optimizing your blog for both your readers (after all, you want to keep those readers coming back) and the search engines. Unfortunately, optimization is an important step that far too many blogs seem to be skipping over, even those that have a broad appeal to surfers and have the potential to be monetizable.
However, optimizing a blog is a bit different than your standard website search engine optimization (SEO), particularly because most blogs run off standard blog platforms, or worse, run as a hosted blog on someone else's domain name. And there are design issues that can be unique to blogs which can impact your rankings.
Also, when you optimize your blog for the user experience, you make it easy for users to return and engage in your blog without dealing with any of the hassles that can cause them to abandon other sites or blog entries. Repeat visitors are the cream of your blog, so by following these tips you have given them the tools they need to return as well as the user experience that makes them want to come back.
Fortunately, if you are on the case to make your blog rank well while not hindering your visitor's experience on your site, there are definitely things you can check – and fix – to prevent any indexing issues from occurring, and ensuring your blog a happy and healthy existence in the search engines.
1. Upgrade from that Default Template. We cringe when I see a blog using the "out of the box" WordPress or MovableType template. Hire a designer to create a unique look for your blog, or at the very least, take advantage of some of the free templates available and customize it a bit with a unique logo or a slight color upgrade.
2. Say No To Bad Color Schemes. While a hot pink with lime green color scheme might be your favorite, consider what your readers will be expecting. That color scheme might work perfectly on a teenage gossip site, but would look extremely out of place as the corporate blog for a men's suit company. Likewise, gamers would think nothing of a black background on an Xbox 360 blog, but it would look horrendous on a parenting or pregnancy site. So while you should experiment with colors to find a good mix for your blog, keep in mind user experience and their expectations.
3. RSS Me! Make sure you have RSS available. Many hosted blogging solutions don't have RSS automatically available, so you will need to add it. And when you do add it, ensure you have those RSS links in an obvious spot. Don't tuck them away at the very bottom of your index page after your most recent 20 entries, or hide them on a separate "About Us" page.
4. Offer RSS & Feed Subscription Buttons. Yes, when people want to subscribe to a blog, they will often look for that orange RSS logo as well as the logos of the standard aggregators such as Bloglines. So it is worth the time to add the most popular ones to your blog so visitors can easily do their one-click subscriptions to your feed without it require much effort on their part. If you make it hard to subscribe, most just won't bother. FeedButton offers a service that allows you to offer multiple RSS aggregator and feed reader buttons with a single expanding rollover button.
5. Offer Posts Via Email. Some people just don't get RSS. So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.
6. Decide On Full Or Partial Feeds. Do you offer full feeds or partial feeds? This is a personal preference, and is often dependent on what market space you are blogging in. One option is to offer two feeds, one being an ad-supported full feed, with an RSS ad included, and the other being an ad-free snippet copy of the feed, where readers won't see ads but will have to actually view your blog in order to read your full entry. But this will often come down to personal preference, and the preferences of your readers.
8. Pay attention to Snippets and Descriptions. If you do use snippets for your RSS feed, be sure to make them compelling or leave readers with a cliffhanger to encourage them to click and read the full entry. This will get you many more readers to your entries than just using the default option of including the first X number of words in the blog post as the snippet. Use your excerpts to generate interest and clicks.
9. Avoid Overloading on Widgets. Widgets are awesome, visitors love them, but having a large number of javascripts running will bog down your site big-time. Choose site speed and performance over that fancy widget you just found that you may not really need.
10. Navigation. If your blog is on a corporate website, proper on-page linking through-out the website is important. Many sites will just have a link to their main blog page which is a lost opportunity to provide visibility for your valuable content. Syndicating recent or featured headlines in the sidebar of your WordPress pages and creating content hubs pages around a specific topics are two ideas to get you going.
Source: 10 Tips To Optimize Your Blog
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