Technorati is tracking around 27 million blogs and there are about 75,000 new blogs launched every day. To stand out with this kind of competition optimize your business blog using the same optimization tactics you would use with your web site. Business blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.
Increase rankings of the blog regular search engines and blog search engines, increase traffic to the blog from sources like Yahoo MyWeb, Google , del.icio.us, Digg, Furl or Blogmarks). Consider keywords when writing your blog titles. Keywords should NOT determine your content. Optimize the template and make sure titles appear in the title tag and append the title tag (hard code) with the most important phrase for your blog.
Optimize Categories. When you create categories for your blog, be sure to consider keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate.
Social bookmarking sites can be excellent sources of traffic to your blog, so be sure to make it easy for readers to bookmark your blog posts. You can do this by adding some code to your blog template for each of the major social bookmarking sites. Here’s a tool for social bookmarking links. Here’s another tool that uses icons instead of text links.
Submit your blog to RSS and Blog directories. Also submit the blog to regular directories like DMOZ, BOTW, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Microsoft bCentral, etc that have categories for blogs.
Resource like a blog can be a lot more attractive to link to than many company web sites. As you establish a good syndication and distribution network for your business blog, your linking strategy can shift from push to pull. Pull strategy linking means that you can achieve significant numbers of new links simply by publishing new, useful content.
Use analytics tools like Feedburner for basic information about your feed subscribers, referring traffic and most popular posts. Regular web site analytics tools or blog stats specific tool will give you information about the actual blog web pages. Monitor your blog stats as you would your web site stats for trends, problems and opportunities.
RSS feed subscriptions to running keyword searches for terms relevant to your blog. Tools include Google Alerts, PubSub, BlogPulse and IceRocket .This will help you become aware of mentions of your blog so you can respond in comments and take part in the dialogue. No matter how many optimization tactics you employ with a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is effective if quality and usefulness of the content is best. |