Global PR Blog Week 1.0

Getting blog postings into search engines

How to instantly get your business blog postings to show up in the search engines

Search engines love blogs.

Blogs tend to be frequently updated, contain fresh insights on hot topics, link to other sites, and provide resources for further topic exploration.

That's one reason why blog entries tend to predominate over regular website pages for many search topics.

There are two things that you should know to make sure that you optimize the search engine placement for your blog. First is how to write your blog entry so that it does well in the search engines. Second is how to make sure the search engines find your blog.

How To Write Blog Entries So They Rank Well In The Search Engines:

1. Before writing any blog entry that you want to use as a search engine traffic magnet, figure out what keywords you want it to be found under when people search. Most of the time you will be most successful with two word combinations or higher ("marketing strategy" rather than simply "marketing".)

2. Use your chose keyword combination frequently throughout your post. They should be in your headline, the first sentence of your copy, and around 5% of your copy throughout your posting. Don't go much higher, as you will then be penalized and won't show up at all.

3. Write good content to which people will want to link. Most search engines rely not just on the words on your page, but also the links into a given page to determine where sites rank in their results. So, if you write great stuff to which people choose to link, you'll generally do much better than writing carefully crafted, keyword-dense copy that is so bad that nobody sends links your way.

4. Write postings that are longer than normal blog entries. Search engines discount short content pages, as this is a favorite tactic of spammers. 250 words or more is ideal for placement with the search engines.

5. Structure your blog template well, with your headline as an h1 tag, your headline as your title tag, using your blog's keyword function to get your keywords placed another time on the page, etc. You may want to ask your programmer to work with your blog's template for you to optimize these factors.

How To Make Sure The Search Engines Find Your Blog Entries:

Many people think that the secret to getting listed in search engines is submitting each page to the engines on a regular basis. That practice may have worked well in the past, but now search engines give top credit to pages that they find on their own through following links. Thus, smart bloggers work hard to make sure that there are multiple links to their key blog listings:

1. When you write something great, link directly to that post from your main website using the title of the entry or better yet, your targeted keywords as the text in the link.

2. Make comments on other people's blogs, linking into your page that discusses that same topic, again, using your targeted keywords as the text in the link.

3. Use the power of RSS syndication and server side includes to pull your headlines and short excerpts into other pages on your site, such as your index page and news pages. This process gets technical, so I won't explain it here, but here's an example of a site pulling a blog's entries into their pages using RSS: Aviation News. There are several programs out there that make this possible, one of my favorites is CaRP. Tools like these can be used either to pull results in from your own blog, or from other many other news sources.

4. Submit your blog and its RSS feeds to each of the blog search engines. You can find them either by searching the web for topics like "promote your blog", "blog search engines" and "RSS feeds", or can cut the time required dramatically by picking up a copy of Blogging For Business, which contains a list of the top 50 places to promote your blog.

As you do so, and as you write a constant stream of great copy, you'll discover that your blog is not only showing up in many different search engines, but that tons of traffic are coming to your site as a result.

Finally, we promised to show you how you can instantly get your blog content into one of the top search engines.

Yahoo has a great feature in their MyYahoo service which allows you to pull the most recent posts from whatever blogs you choose and have them displayed each time you open up your myYahoo page, like this:

While this is a great way to be able to easily track posts made to the blogs that you find most interesting, it's also a great way to get Yahoo to add your entries to their index, quickly and at no cost.

Here’s the way this strategy works. Simply go to Yahoo and click the MyYahoo link close to the top of the page.

If you don't have a MyYahoo account follow their simple instructions to create one.

Once you get into your MyYahoo page, click the choose content button, then on the resulting page, click the box for RSS Headlines under the MyYahoo! Essentials header.

This will make RSS Headlines live on your MyYahoo page. Click the Edit box next to that option which will take you to a Choose Your RSS Sources page. In the top box there, put in the address to your blog amd save your results.

Now, go to your blog and make a blog posting.

Come back to your MyYahoo page and refresh it. It may take a couple of tries, but, assuming that Yahoo’s server’s not too busy at the moment, you should see the content update on your MyYahoo page, with your brand new post being pulled into your MyYahoo page.

Here’s where the cool part comes in. Calling an RSS listing into a MyYahoo page also triggers the visit of a Yahoo spider to your site, checking out any of the pages that haven't been previously indexed in their search engine.

So, in the process of pulling your RSS feed into your MyYahoo page, you've also alerted Yahoo that you have a new post, which usually means that your post will be added to their index in record time! I've seen it work in as little as 24 hours. Try it yourself and see what happens! Then watch your traffic soar...

Aren't you glad that you came today?

Author: Don Crowther | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 1 comments
Category: @ Don Crowther | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

 

About

The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.

Links

The New PR Wiki

Recent Entries

Looking forward to 2.0

Site Statistics and Trends

A participant’s final thoughts

Traditional PR is dead - Long Live DIY PR

Quiet is the new loud

Recent Comments

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