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How to optimize your blog for search engine traffic

Posted on 05. Jul, 2009 by admin in SEO

Most blog design­ers focus on mak­ing your blog look the way you want it to. But unfor­tu­nately for blog­gers, not very many of those great blog design­ers are also SEOs by trade, mean­ing that the blog design you use could actu­ally be hurt­ing your search engine rank­ings. While you may have a great design that looks won­der­ful to read­ers, new read­ers might not find you if your blog isn’t rank­ing well organ­i­cally in the search engines.

So here is advice on how you can opti­mize that blog of yours for both users and search engines with­out alien­at­ing one or the other.

1) Get rid of The Default Tem­plate — Looks do Count!
Hire a designer to cre­ate a unique look for your blog, remem­ber first impres­sions mat­ter. You can also take advan­tage of some of the free tem­plates avail­able and cus­tomize it a bit with a unique logo or a slight color upgrade.

2) Bad Color Schemes
While a hot pink with lime green color scheme might be your favorite color, con­sider what your read­ers will be expect­ing. That color scheme might work per­fectly for you, but it might turn your vis­i­tors off. So while you should exper­i­ment with col­ors to find a good mix for your blog, keep in mind user expe­ri­ence and their expec­ta­tions. The col­ors you like may not be some­thing they want to see after a hard days work. Think nice sooth­ing col­ors, easy on the eyes and not too busy!

3) URL Struc­ture
The URL struc­ture of your blog should filled with words and try to avoid num­bers and extra­ne­ous char­ac­ters. Many peo­ple like the date in their URLs, but I pre­fer it as domain.com/category/posttitle. This keeps the URL short, easy to remem­ber and crawlable and it pro­vides key­words within the url.

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. Make it easy for your vis­i­tors to sub­scribe to your RSS Feed.

5) Sitemap
Most blogs do not have a sitemap but it can­not hurt to have one. You can use Google’s web­mas­ter tools to cre­ate a sitemap. This will just help the spi­ders index your site thor­oughly and efficiently.

6) Ping­ing
If you want to increase your traf­fic you have to ping the blog search engines. You can do this through ping-o-matic. If you use Feed­Burner they also have a list of blog search engines that you can ping through them. By doing this every time you write a blog post, it will show up on search engines such as Tech­no­rati and Icerocket.

Related Posts:

• The Impor­tance of Web Directory
• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Techniques
• Ten Sim­ple SEO Tips
• Choos­ing A Good SEO Com­pany Is Key To A Suc­cess­ful SEO Campaign
• What is Inter­net Mar­ket­ing and Search Engine Marketing?

Tags: advice, advice-on-how, both-users, engine, every-website, important-online, marketing-tool, owner-should, SEO, the-most