I was in one forum today and replied to a thread of a blog owner who was asking for SEO tips specifically for his blog. I took a look at his blog, and indeed, he needed some help. I’m not going to disclose the whereabouts of that blog but if you are one who is guilty of having a blog that still needs help in being discovered, I’m going to show you here what I told him and add more juicy stuff.
Before thinking about the search engines, you should think about the people who:
» are going to see your blog.
» need the good and useful content/information that led them to go and check out your blog.
Keep your actions focused on all things that will help those people to remember, bookmark and subscribe to your blog. Think about your favorite blogs. What do you like about them? Why do you keep coming back? In other words, think about your target market and supply them with what they want. How do you get to know what they want? Well, for starters, you can know what your visitors are doing and how much time they spend on your blog through Google Analytics. For realtime analysis you could try Performancing Metrics.
You already have lots of good content which is great! However, it is good practice to assume that a person visiting your site usually has a short attention span and you should do whatever it takes to change that by the time he or she arrives on your blog.
First things first, take care of the basics such as:
- The blog title/logo that should be displayed at the top of the page. Also, incorporate some nice colors and embed a couple of videos. In fact, you could make your own video! Apply some layout that will emphasize the boundaries between the post body and the photos etc. Check out other blogs out there to get ideas. One of the things to look out for in case you don’t notice it: shadows!
- The means for people to easily subscribe to and/or share your blog. Go to FeedBurner and get their FeedFlare to be automatically displayed at the bottom of each old and new posts. Get some Chicklets from there too and add them where your readers can see them.
- Let your readers know if you are in any of the social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook etc. by including appropriate buttons for your users to follow. Just do a specific search for any other button you’d like and you’ll find them. If you’re not utilizing social media yet, you must start now. Join as many as you can and also add a ShareThis button which will allow your visitors to share your posts with their friends via multiple social sites and networks fast.
Do those things and then I tell you, when you look at your blog again you are going to want to invest a little more than just your time on it and go buy a domain name for it!