Friday, October 27, 2006

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!
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)

3 comments:

Dave Taylor said...

Nice job with your writeup. If you can, pop into your blogger template and change the title on your entries from blogname:entrytitle to entrytitle:blogname too. :-)

hvyTK said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
hvyTK said...

Thanks for the tip, Dave! I have been scouring the blogger help section to figure out how to modify my main page to be "hvy TK:latestentrytitle" but I can't seem to find it (yet). I did notice that the archived pages here on my blog are Post pages (links to the help section) which have the blogname:entrytitle convention (instead of just blogname). I'll keep digging for more info and post here if I find it.