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Optimized Blogging BasicsWednesday, January 26, 2005 By: Joe Abraham My Grandma just turned a young, hip 63 years old, and while my family was sitting around celebrating and noshing on crudités, she looked at me profoundly and asked: “Joey, (she calls me that) what’s a Blogger?” If blogs have reached my Grandma, then it is official, new media is king. The premise behind blogging is simple: you say something and people react to it. Sometimes they like what you say, sometimes they don’t, but they often come back to see what you’ll say next. This method has panned out very well for some alternative news sources and personal sites (Gawker is a great site that follows this model). But what started as an online journal has become the personal journal of the world as even traditional media has embraced the era of the blog (CNN and MSNBC both have blogs on many different topics). So how do blogs fit into the search engine optimization puzzle? Blogs tend to be treated like news sources, so engines tend to spider them more frequently then pages with static content. This is good news since chances are the spider will visit other pages besides your blog. You can also link to more information on a subject within the body copy. This can help get new pages indexed quickly. Combine this with SEO practices that you already have in place, and this is a highly effective way to quickly and easily build out new content around your keywords. Once a blog is created, you can easily create an RSS or Atom feed. The RSS feed allows people to quickly view the contents of your blog and check for updates, driving traffic to your site with allure of a new entry. Creating a blog couldn’t be simpler. There are several free services that enable anyone to jump on the blogging boat. Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga are just a few of the big players in the world of blogging. Blogger is my personal favorite of the free tools. It can be used by a person at level. For the beginner, it offers a free subdomain to post entries. If you decide you’d like to host the blog on its own site, Blogger can easily be set up to post to an outside server. Blogger has also made it easy to allow multiple people to post to the same blog, which allows for fresh content to be added continuously. One concern that has arisen recently is blog spam. Blog spam is generated by a spider-like program that searches for comment sections and submits gibberish with links throughout. This is a black hat method to increase link popularity. It’s nearly impossible to block, but you can make it totally ineffective. By using robots meta tags, you can instruct the engine spiders not to look at the comment pages or anything else on those pages. The tag would look like this: No matter how you choose to set up your blog, the important part is actually doing it and soon. Regular updates keep your site on the high priority list of sites to spider. RSS feeds help drive traffic effortlessly to your site. And once you’ve established yourself in the blogging community, inbound links are sure to follow from fellow bloggers who like what you’re doing. If you liked this article, consider signing up for our information newsletter. All of our articles come directly from our newsletter we send out every other week on Tuesday. Consider signing up. It's free and easy. Subscribe to SageRock.com Killer Web Marketing Newsletter by entering your email address in this form and click "Join" | ||||||
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