maximizing the findability of your blog

Another great panel this afternoon at the Blog Business Summit with Dave Taylor, Tris Hussey and John Battelle all about maximizing the findability of your blog (SEO)

Dave leads the discussion panel, and tells us to take a look at the Yahoo webmaster help page and Google's webmaster resources to see exactly what they tell you to do to increase your search results. This is all white hat (acceptable to the search engines) stuff. The black hat (unacceptable) stuff will get you blacklisted, a fate as good as death.

1. Keyword research pays dividends - spend time understanding how folks search for the keywords around your product (your blog). You want seven keywords to match your stuff, not one. Maximize the chance they'll find your stuff!

• WordTracker - pretty expensive, but their free demo is pretty darn good to help
  
• Yahoo Search Marketing (also known as Overture)
  
• Google AdWords - you can sign up for the account and poke around the Google database
  

2. Keyword Density matters - but it's an art to find the balance between too much (spammy) and too little (nondescript)

Don't write like this: I really like this thing, and it's cool. You shoud buy one of these, you should visit this place, you should send your business to these guys. (what are your keywords?)

Or like this: I really like free concert tickets and by going to free concert tickets to buy my Who tickets, I got great seats! Yep, free concert tickets really rocks. (this is spammy)

The key is somewhere in between. (that's the art part)

3. The Secret of inbound links
The way to get inbound links? Give outbound links. Be careful, because you bleed visitors every time you link.

4. SEO Best Practices

• Good titles (what appears in the browser title bar -- this is critical!)
  
• Good headlines
• Reasonable Keyword Density
• Occasionally emphasize a keyword with bold or italics, as appropriate
  
• Good category names (do keyword searches on these categories, too)
  

TIP: The way to tell if you are in a search engine? do site:yourdomainname and or link:yourdomainname and you can tell. Anything other than a list of your pages means you're hosed.

(making a note here that I changed the title of my blog from the cryptic "HVY TK" to what it is today thanks to this panel)