How to optimize your blog

I’ve mentioned some of these tips before, but here are a few quick wins for optimizing your blog and getting the word out. With these tips, you’ll get your blog indexed by search engines faster, publicized in multiple places, and ranked higher in search engines.

All that you need to do after following these tips is create the killer content!

Use FeedBurner

I’ve mentioned FeedBurner before, but let me revisit it. It’s really easy to set up, and it’s very effective at allowing you to publicize your blog and report on usage of your blog’s RSS feeds. (What is RSS?)

One of the most valuable services that FeedBurner offers is called PingShot. This service lets other publication services know when you create a new blog post. Your post then automatically gets publicized and updated on those services.

Someone I know once voiced a concern about FeedBurner: “What if FeedBurner goes out of business?” Well, FeedBurner was acquired by Google, so I’m thinking that you don’t have anything to worry about there.

Here’s my previous review of FeedBurner.

Technorati tags

Basically, you add links to the end of your blog post called “tags.” They point to Technorati tag pages with other blog posts related to yours. For example, here’s the tag page for [internet marketing]. (Note: Technorati doesn’t do tag tracking anymore.)

When FeedBurner’s PingShot tells Technorati that your blog has been updated, Technorati visits your site. If Technorati sees any of these tags on your new post, it will put your new post on its related tag pages.

What’s the big deal then? Search engines like to see you sharing the wealth in terms of linking to other content on the Web. By adding Technorati tags to your posts, you are linking to other related content. And this related content in turn links right back to you!

To see how Technorati tags work, play around with Eric Myers’s Tag Generator. (Note: the tag generator doesn’t exist anymore.)

Use WordPress

WordPress is the de facto blogging platform. The standard. And one of the best things about it is its support for plugins. Plugins allow you to easily change how your blog works. You can use plugins for improved SEO and to improve the general user experience of your blog.

Here are some good plugins:

• FeedBurner FeedSmith [via Wayback Machine]: Points your blog’s feed links to FeedBurner so users don’t subscribe to the wrong feed.
• WP Tags to Technorati: Changes your WordPress blog’s tags into Technorati tags automatically.
• MCEComments: Add formatting controls to the comment box so the commenter can add links, bold formatting, italic formatting, etc.
• reCAPTCHA: Add a CAPTCHA word puzzle for commenters to solve to eliminate spam. When they solve the puzzle, they are also helping universities scan books. (Note: this plugin doesn’t exist anymore.)
• SimpleTwitter: Lets you automatically display your most recent Twitter tweet on your blog.

Enhance your blog code for SEO

MyTypes has a great starter guide for some SEO changes for your WordPress theme. I recommend following his steps under Page Titles, Duplicate Content, and Change Permalink Structure. Ignore the rest.

Bold the key phrase in each paragraph

You should bold the key phrase in each paragraph. What single group of words summarizes what the entire paragraph is about?

A lot of people like to scan content to see if they’d like to read it further. Showing short summaries in each paragraph helps give them hints on whether or not they’d be interested in the contents. On top of that, search engines give a little extra weight to these bolded words. If you’re using your key phrases correctly, you may end up bolding some words that are important for your SEO strategy as well.

Again, create good content

Hopefully these tips will uncover some ideas for you that you didn’t know were helpful—or maybe even possible.

But I must remind you that your efforts will be in vain if the content of your blog isn’t good to begin with. Always be thinking about your blog and what you can be writing about. Then you can just let it flow when you sit down and open up WordPress.

Photo credit: I won’t write you a love song… by Mademoiselle Ayumi. Some rights reserved.