Optimizing Your Blog For The Search Engines

If you have a blog and do not want to have it to consume you life with promotional and marketing efforts, you will have to turn instead to search engine optimization techniques.

Although there is an ongoing debated regarding the best ways to achieve search engine optimization, those who know about such things seem to agree on two points.

1) Maximum search engine optimization demands that you use specific, well chosen keywords to optimize the content of each of your blog's pages; and,

2) You need to create either one-way inbound links to your blog, or reciprocal links.

The search engine optimization for your blogs should begin before you even build them, with keyword research. The first thing you need to learn, if your blog is to generate decent traffic, is what keywords will attract the greatest number of visitors for the smallest amount of work.

The easiest way to do this is to either pay for a daily or monthly subscription to WordTracker, or to use the Overture tool to research the number of searches which have been performed on every blog appropriate keyword of which you can possibly think.

Make a record of the number of searches which have been done on your selected keywords, and then analyze how many pages are already using those keywords by searching for each of them on Google.

In addition to determining the number of pages using them, look at the sites which are the leading competitors for them, according to their positions in the Google page rankings. You don't want a keyword which is already in use by a highly ranked site.

What you do want in a keyword which will maximize your blog's search engine optimization is a high number of searches, with a low number of sites already using it, and with those sites having low Google page rankings. If you find keywords which qualify on all a three counts, grab them and don't let go!

Now you are ready to create your boog's onpage search engine optimization. You accomplish this by using your selected keywordsat a density of about 1.5%, or six times for every three hundred words, on each page of your blog, and by including them in your page's headers and titles.

You need to make sure that the other content of your blog is related to your keywords and useful to both your readers and the search engine spiders.

Finally, you can conclude your efforts for search engine optimization with offpage optimization, creating title links to your blog which contain your chosen keyword and submitting them to blog directories.

You can also join link exchanges and offer to feature links to other quality blogs in your blog, if your blog links will receive equal billing in them.