10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog

There’s a lot of blogs out there – a lot – so getting yours noticed could be difficult. The good news is that it can be done and those who have done it are willing to share a few tricks of the trade.

"There are 93.8 million blogs worldwide," says SEO-PR president and co-founder Greg Jarboe. "Getting excited about getting a blog is like getting excited when the phone book arrives."

"Yeah, but, it’s your name in print," says Navin Johnson.

That’s not a reason to not have one though. A blog is still an effective way to get noticed and to gain an audience. "Things will starting happening to you now," reminds Navin.

But only if you do it right. "If you don’t have a blog, go ahead and start one," says Jarboe, "but the whole industry has moved on. It’s now about performance; it’s now about results."

Okay, so how do you get those results? Well, there’s probably not a finite set of things, but there are some good suggestions. Jarboe suggests staying away from turf already claimed. "Look for emerging terms. Find terms that are upcoming or growing in importancethat don’t have five years of entrenched bloggers competing for them."

But if you have to enter ground already well-traveled, it’s a good idea to get in good with those that know the road. Join their conversations, get their attention, earn a link.

Jarboe joins Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, LLC in providing some expert advice on optimizing a blog, and we’ve organized that advice into a neat top ten list. (The plugins recommended are all for WordPress.)

10 Ways To Optimize Your Blog

1.    Tag clouds and tag pages; check out Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for creating these. Spencer says he doubled traffic to one his blogs by adding it.

2.    Add a "Related Posts" feature. Spencer recommends the Contextual Related Posts plugin for WordPress.

3.    Top Ten posts feature to display most popular posts

4.    Add "next" and "previous" post buttons

5.    Build inbound links

6.    Title tags – use SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress to assign unique title tags to individual posts.

7.    Claim your blog at Technorati and use Technorati tags

8.    Use "sticky" posts that always appear at the top of the page as a way to add a keywords-rich introduction to category pages. Adhesive plugin works for this.

9.    Use the Buzzlogic tool to find out which bloggers are most influential in conversations – refer to them and try to get them to link to you.

10.    Get into other bloggers’ blog rolls (trackbacks and comments won’t help in link gain.

Bonus: Rick Klau, who works in strategic partner development for Google, also has some solid advice for optimizing RSS feeds via Feedburner and even Facebook. He also reiterates the importance of providing full text feeds rather than partial feeds. Check out 10 Tips For Optimizing RSS.