Hello from the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking on search engine optimizing blogs and RSS feeds. If you recall a post of mine from last month, I went into some detail on some tweaks I had made to this blog to make it more search engine optimal. I thought I’d continue where I had left off, with some more handy-dandy blog SEO tips:

• Use Heading tags
  Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So use them to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme. Don’t make the date an H1 tag, instead make the current category name or tag name on your category page/tag page an H1 tag. Make the titles of your blog posts H2 tags. More on this here.
• Add emphasis within your posts
  Use bold tags, strong tags, etc. within the copy to help identify to search engines which words/phrases should be given more weight.
• Make use of “sticky” posts
  A “sticky” post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. The “sticky” feature is available in some blog systems by default (e.g. Blogger.com) and in others through the use of a plugin (e.g. the Adhesive plugin for WordPress). Sticky posts make it easy to make your targeted keywords more prominent on a category page or tag page, because it will ensure the keyword-rich copy you write in a sticky post stays at the top of the page. More on how to do this here, and an example of it in use here.
• Link to and profile your contributors (for group blogs)
  If your contributing bloggers have their own independent websites, they’ll appreciate you passing them some link popularity. To do so most effectively, don’t link to them site-wide but instead from your home page and from within each post that they author. Also create an author profile page for each of them, with a link to that author’s site, a biographical statement (taken from the “About Yourself” field in their profile), and the posts that they’ve authored. This is my profile page for example. Let them define the anchor text of the link to their site, The way I did it for this blog, which runs on WordPress, was to get each author to specify the anchor text they wanted in the Nickname field on their User information and I used that instead of their name at the top of each post.
• Do keyword research
  Whenever you craft a title, a tag, a post’s body copy, a post slug, or a category, you should be considering whether the words you are using are what your target audience are searching for. Here are some free tools: Overture’s, Google’s; and paid tools: Wordtracker’s, Trellian’s.

If you want proof this stuff really works, and that it’s not hard to do, my 14-year-old daughter in 2 days created her first site, a blog, using WordPress, about Neopets. She wisely named it the The Ultimate Neopet Cheats Site, after doing the research (okay, I helped her) to find that “neopet cheats” was a pretty popular term (albeit not as popular as “neopets cheats”) and not very competitive. Lo and behold, just 2 weeks after launching the site, it’s already on page 2 in Google and Yahoo for “neopet cheats” and climbing! And that was just with one link from my blog.

UPDATE: You can now download my Powerpoint slides from Search Engine Strategies on optimizing your blog and RSS feeds. Also, by the way, my daughter’s blog is now on page 1 in Google for her targeted term. 🙂

UPDATE 2: My daughter has now moved her Neopets Cheats site off of WordPress.com because of their policy of not allowing the posting of AdSense ads.

UPDATE 3: My daughter now has a Swicki on her blog which brings in additional AdSense revenue.