CREATE BLOG |
OPTIMIZING YOUR BLOG FOR SEARCH ENGINES |
It is important to stay on-topic with each entry. Posting a long entry about.Search engines match Web pages to keywords people search for. If you wantbetter visibility in search engines, use the keywords you think your readers would be searching with. Don’t use them arbitrarily or indiscriminately;doing so is called keyword stuffing or keyword spam and is easily detected by search engines. Sites are penalized in search listings for trying to game the system. The trick here is to write your entries to the point, so that they are clearly topical to your readers and to the search engines.
Make your entry titles count It is amazing how many entry titles have nothing to do with the entry. This point is an optimization downfall for many bloggers. A scathing criticism of a public figure might be titled “It’s an outrage!” and never mention the public figure’s name. The page optimization tips of the preceding section are important. But it’s likewise important to remember that many people — and the most influential ones — read their blogs in newsreaders. Your most loyal and voracious read-ers might never visit your site after their first visit, when they find and subscribe to your RSS feed. (See Chapter 13 for everything you need to know about RSS, subscription feeds, and newsreaders. Plus a delightful recipe for peach cobbler.)
Because of the increasing importance of a blog’s feed in promoting and delivering a blog’s content, a relatively new set of practices that could be called feed optimization has developed alongside search engine optimization. Feed optimization is closely related to search engine optimization, thanks to thepresence and popularity of blog search engines.
crawl Web pages to build their searchable indexes, blog search engines crawl RSS feeds (and sometimes pages also) to build their indexes.
Make your feed visible and easy to grab. Some blog services and programs bury the feed link, making it hard for a visitor to find. In those cases, it’s difficult to copy the link into a newsreader, which is how many people subscribe to blog feeds. Some WordPress templates bury the feed link in miniscule letters at the bottom of the page. Blogger.com does not put the feed link on the page at all, as a default page design. Ideally, the feed link is positioned up on the page, in a sidebar, with letters or an icon big enough to find easily. Chicklets and newsreader-specific subscription buttons (see Chapter 13 for explanations of all this) make life easy for your visitors. It might seem counterproductive to make it easy for your readers to leave the site and never return, but obscuring your RSS feed is the truly unproductive tactic, and a good way to lose readers forever.Using FeedBurner Bloggers who are serious about their feeds know about FeedBurner. A free service (with an upgraded paid version) designed to optimize and monetize content feeds, FeedBurner works with just about any blog program or service. Almost every blog service generates a feed for your blog entries, but FeedBurner doesn’t care about these native feeds. FeedBurner creates a new feed for your blog, shows you how to put a new link on your blog, assists in feed promotion, pings blog directories and newsreaders when you add an entry, measures the readership of your feed, and can help make a little money by putting ads in the feed if you want. That’s a lot of work for a feedoptimizer, and FeedBurner is deservedly popular.You can get started with FeedBurner without making any commitment and without changing your blog in any way.