Optimize Your Blog - Making Your Blog Search Engine Friendly
Buzz it
Optimizing a blog is just another way of saying how to make your blog Search Engine Friendly (or SEO friendly) to increase blog traffic. (Some might also call this gaming Google but I digress). This is a HUGE topic and there is no shortage of so-called SEO experts who are willing to help.
I’ve been noticing a lot of my readers searching here for tips on the best way to optimize their blog. So I thought I would write about it today.
That however is not an easy answer because the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms. To make matters worse most of the SEO experts don’t even agree with each other either.
Then there are the Black-Hat vs. ethical SEO methods for optimizing your blog. It can be very frustrating and confusing for the average blogger to sort out. Sigh!
So today I’m going to burst the bubble and tell you the rules for blog optimization are not etched in stone. Yes, you heard right. It is not just black and white. There are grey areas for you to consider (others might call it pushing the envelope).
The Search Engines are forever in flux and evolving, and just when you think you have your blog set up right they change the rules again and the rug gets pulled from beneath you.
Just recently I went through this myself and this blog was pushed out of the first page in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) to the back of the pack. Which is very frustrating for a guy who was the first in the blog tips niche.
I think I’ve resolved the problem after noticing my .htaccess file had been filled with garbage that I’ve now cleared out. I believe a rogue plugin might be responsible but it’s still a mystery as I speak.
My page rank has also been up and down like a yoyo and it reminds me of watching the stocks during a bear market. Changing my domain URL last year didn’t help either. So I don’t worry about it anymore because it can drive you nuts obsessing over it.
For example, nobody seems to agree on whether we should tell the search engines to not index our RSS newsfeed. Some SEO experts will tell you we should nofollow our feeds because we could be penalized for duplicate content.
On the other hand some SEO experts claim the search engines are smart enough to tell the difference between our blog content and newsfeeds. So they recommend not worrying about it.
So who do we believe? That’s a good question and one that I’ve grappled with myself. Fiddling with this SEO stuff can also get you into trouble and make matters worse if you’re not careful.
This year I ran an experiment to see how long I could remain on the SERPS first page without writing any content. Everything was fine for a few months until I noticed my position slipping. So the answer is you can get away with it for awhile but it will eventually catch up and bite you in the derriere.
In all my years of experience as a blogger there is one thing I know for certain that will always be true .. and that is we should keep writing good content.
So my advice is – the first and most important rule for optimizing your blog is to stick to the basics and write quality content for your niche … and write regularly. Keep to your chosen niche and don’t waver. The search engines will love you for it.
You can’t go wrong there. But please (please) don’t cheat like the plagiarizers who steal content to get a good position on the SERPS. Be an ethical blogger and stay away from the black-hats. They may get good results over the short-haul but eventually the search engines will wise-up and so will their readers.
Stay tuned as I continue my series on SEO and blog optimization and sort out the nonsense from reality. In the mean time I have to optimize this post and make it a little more SEO friendly. 
Filed under: Blog SEO, Blog Tips, Featured Articles, Search Engine, Writing Blog Content
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Webmasters over internet always say that it is easy to SEO Blogs as compared to sites because search engines love blogs. To be very true, I am not comfortable with that because I think websites are much better to SEO because we have their structure and code in our control. Blog’s code is not in our control and we have to use plenty of plugins to control the flow and layout(I am not in the favor of using plugins because they can have very malicious code in them). Blogs are perfect for content publishing and handling though.
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@arshie, I’m not sure where you got your information that a blog’s “code is not in our control”. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I have absolute control over all of my code with a self-hosted Wordpress blog.
The fact that blogs are generally updated more often than static websites give it a favorable advantage with the search engines as well.
Plugins only add enhancements to the software but are completely optional and up to the user to choose to use or not. I have never come across a “malicious” plugin that I’m aware of, although I did find things in my .htaccess file that I never put there which could have been from a plugin. But I wouldn’t consider it being malicious. When choosing a plugin make sure you find something that’s popular and has testimonies from other bloggers before considering it.
Thanks for your comment and I hope you will reconsider choosing a blog as an enhancement to your website. One does not have replace the other. They can both be used to compliment one another if done the right way.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 14th, 2009 11:20 am:
Sorry I am just new here. Is your Blog wordpress based or Blogger based? I am trying to stay on blogger, but want to host part of my subdomains because I need it. I am not ready to make the transition to Wordrpress since blogger is doing the trick so far pretty good.
Is it possible to have your blog on Blogger hosted for free like blog.mydomain.com and then have the www.mydomain.com hosted with an external provider?
Thanks, and good job
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Hi Marti, although it is a little off-topic I’ll try to answer your question. This is a Wordpress blog and like you I started out on Blogger. If you want to stay on Blogger I believe you will find all of the information you need in the post below:
http://www.blogbloke.com/custom-domain-blogger-dns-seo-godaddy/
It will show you how to set up a Custom Domain with Blogger. Let me know if it helps and welcome to Blog Bloke!
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 14th, 2009 11:36 am:
You make a good point. First things first. Write good content and worry about the SEO tricks later.
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Thanks daveyboy.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 18th, 2009 2:43 pm:
you have described it very well. for me SEO is a process, as i think it would improve as i delve more into tricks. i am sure the more i take care of my blog the better it would rank. thanks for this article.
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Glad it helped harson and thanks for saying so.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 18th, 2009 2:31 pm:
Thanks for the great tips on making blogging search engine friendly as I just started my blog and found very useful information in your article. Thank You
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@John Paul Aguiar .. welcome to Blog Bloke Central Paul! There’s a lot more to come so stay tuned.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 24th, 2009 2:25 am:
Wow… this was just what I was looking for. Great post, thanks a lot!
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@Keith Sweat, no worries mate!
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 24th, 2009 2:26 am:
This fact is scary for new bloggers. But I don’t worry this much. You are very, very right with your advice to focus on the basic, especially QUALITY CONTENT.
Thank you for this valuable information.
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@Walter, Thanks for dropping by and your comments. It’s always gratifying to hear from a happy customer
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 24th, 2009 2:27 am:
Great job, this really sums it all up. Thanks a lot!
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@K. Sweating, excellent!
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 24th, 2009 2:28 am:
Quality content is the best way to go even though it appears to take a while to build at times. The most recent Google slap is specifically directed at affiliate sites that do not provide good content. For myself, WordPress has been the best platform on which to accomplish that. My site listed here is relatively new, but I know from others I’ve worked on that I will have to build a good content base to rank well.
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@Sherryd, building a house of brick on solid ground may take a little more work and time but it’s certainly well worth the effort over the long term.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 24th, 2009 2:29 am:
Wow great article! Added this one to my favorites!
Does anybody here know a good program to check your pagerank? I’ve been using different kinds and everytime it is not accurate. It always differs from the manual search.
Thanks in advance. Regards from Scotland
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@Elisa Sweat, like I said above I wouldn’t bother. Experienced bloggers such as myself no longer take it seriously. As you mentioned the results are inconsistent and are not a good representation of a site’s value. That’s my advice.
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Blog Bloke (@blogbloketips) reply on July 25th, 2009 3:48 pm:
As you have said no two SEO expert have a same opinion. So, I will just limit myself in posting fresh new content rather than any other SEO tricks. Thanks for sharing.
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SEO for blog is important, and it bring much traffic to blog/site. Your post supply lot of information for webmaster. Tks!
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Am very new to search engine optimizations and this article helps a lot for new comers and its all about fresh content, content is the king… thanks for this information,
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Nice tips..
Blogs are an excellent way to achieve faster indexing and gain extended visibility.
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Thanks for sharing the tips for the blog to be search engine friendly.
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Thanks for the great tips on making blogging search engine friendly and found very useful information in your article. Thank You
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Optimizing your blog is acting good with Google, or they’d ban your blog and hand cuff you ; just kidding!
P.S. Page rank factor is not as important as others let us think. Just ask Google if you don’t believe me.
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