There are too many great points in optimizing a blog that are straightforward, and written in a way that everyone can understand and benefit from. While blogs can be business related, they can also be personal where you talk about anything that had happened to you in your breakfast or dinner date with someone special. But whether your blog is business or personal, you should ensure that you are optimizing your blog for both your readers and the search engines.

Optimization is an important step that far too many blogs seem to be skipping over, even those that have a broad appeal to surfers and have the potential to be profitable. I would highly recommend first to dump the default template. I flinch when I see a blog using the “out of the box” WordPress or MovableType template. Hire a designer to create a unique look for your blog or at the very least, take advantage of some of the free templates available and customize it a bit with a unique logo or a slight color upgrade.

The looks of your blog really counts. Say no to bad color schemes. While a hot pink with lime green color scheme might be your favorite, consider what your readers will be expecting. That color scheme might work perfectly on a teenage gossip site, but would look extremely out of place as the corporate blog for a men’s suit company. Likewise, gamers would think nothing of a black background on an Xbox 360 blog, but it would look horrendous on a parenting or pregnancy site. So while you should experiment with colors to find a good mix for your blog, keep in mind the user experience and their expectations.

Pinging blog search engines will also increase your traffic. Also make sure that post titles will appear in the title tag and append the title tag with the most important phrase for your blog. Make sure you use post titles as the permalink. Another thing you should optimize in your blog is the categories. When you create a category, make sure you use keywords in the titles. You should also put your article in the appropriate category. On a blog, the categories are an important characteristic that identifies the page type of a blog. Nonetheless, make sure your blog’s information architecture provides other contextually relevant means of navigating through the site.

Furthermore, make sure you have RSS available. Many hosted blogging solutions don’t have RSS automatically available, so you will need to add it. And when you do add it, ensure you have those RSS links in an obvious spot. Don’t tuck them away at the very bottom of your index page after your most recent 20 entries, or hide them on a separate “About Us” page. Place all those handy subscribe links in your sidebar, which is exactly where people will look for them. Some people just don’t get RSS. So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.

Spelling is also worth mentioning. Add one of the many spell checkers to your internet browser and run a quick spell check before you publish your entry. Every word doesn’t have to be perfect, and I am certainly guilty myself of letting on occasional typo slip through unnoticed. If you are blogging about a story, link up the original story as well as other’s commentary on the same topic. When you do so, you will often make those bloggers aware of your blog’s existence when people click from your blog to theirs. And it also increases the odds that they will either link to you on that story or on something you blog about in the future.


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