Don’t end up like the founder of that other “Gone Wild!” web site. If your blog is not fully optimized, you might find yourself in solitary confinement, too. (Cue bad-joke drumfill.)
In addition to our list of 8 important steps to increase your blog traffic, here are some simple, easy-to-implement blog optimization guidelines to help ensure your blog’s freedom and visibility.
There are three main areas to consider when optimizing your blog:
Feeds, Your Blog as a Whole, and Individual Blog Posts.
Optimize Your Feeds
(Read my post on optimizing your RSS and Atom feeds in Wordpress.)
1. Use full text rather than partial text. When your post is viewed in a reader, like Google Reader, make sure your feed is set to display the entire post. The click-through rate for full text vs. partial text in feeds is basically the same, and there are a variety of other arguments in favor of full text feeds. See what Scoble says about this.
2. Show 20 posts. If your blog software defaults to showing 5 or 10 posts in its feeds, then increase it to 20. It’s simply more content for new subscribers and more chances your posts will get passed around.
3. Add categories at the feed level. Normally each individual post includes categories, but it is possible to include categories at the feed level too. View the RSS2 spec.
4. Add an image or logo. Although this feature is not well supported in the different feed readers, it is simple to implement. Adding an image to your feed makes it stand out from the crowd. Adding a logo to your feed is an easy way to reinforce your brand. Here is a great tutorial on adding a logo to your feed.
Logo in feed - blog optimization
5. Enable autodiscovery. If you use just about any browser other than IE 6 or earlier, then a chicklet will show up in the browser URL bar if your feed is autodiscoverable. Add RSS autodiscovery. Add Atom autodiscovery.
Autodiscover chicklet - part of blog optimization strategies
6. Consider using FeedBurner. FeedBurner offers many free services like SmartFeed, FeedFlare, and MyBrand. You can also track subscription rate (while not exact, you can still monitor trends) and a variety of other statistics.
7. Validate your feeds. Once you’ve made changes to your feeds, be sure to validate them. Fixing any errors found during validation will help to ensure your feed is compatible will the variety of readers out there. Validate your feeds here. Chances are the results will contain a couple of warnings. Fix these if you can. The important thing is that your feed is valid.
Optimize Your Blog as a Whole
(Read my post Optimize Your Wordpress Blog as a Whole.)
1. Use custom page titles. If you could only make one change while optimizing your blog, this should be it. Customize every page title in your blog, especially your home page, by including important keywords.
2. Use keyword rich URLs. If your URLs (permalinks) contain search unfriendly query strings like “?p=180,” you need to change your blog’s permalink structure. Most blog software allows you to change the default permalinks to include post titles, categories and tags instead of the cryptic query strings. You can take this one step further by manually customizing each post’s title, i.e. if you want your URL to be different than your post title, you can manually change it to something more concise and/or search friendly. For example, the default URL for this post would be:
/blogs-gone-wild-optimization-strategies-to-ensure-yours-is-of-age/
but I changed it to:
/complete-blog-optimization-guidelines/.
3. Add news reader subscribe buttons. Make it easy for users to subscribe to your blog. Adding buttons for the more popular feed readers gives your users a single click solution for subscribing to your blog. However, don’t go crazy and add 4 million buttons. It’s visually unappealing and confusing for your readers. If they have too many choices, chances are they won’t make one!
News reader buttons - increase your blog visibility
4. Add a Technorati button. Face it. Technorati is the authority on blogs. You definitely want your blog listed on Technorati, and you should make it easy for your readers to ‘Fave’ your blog (add it to their Technorati favorites).
5. Offer email-based subscriptions. This enables your audience to receive your content via email as opposed to using a feed reader. Many (if not the majority of) people are still unfamiliar or not comfortable with the concept of feeds. Of course it depends on your particular audience, but you should consider offering an email-based subscription.
6. List most recent blog posts. Make it easy for your readers to see what your latest post titles are. Show 3 - 5 titles.
7. Add a Google Sitemap. Make your blog readily visible to Google.
8. Ping other blogs when you are talking about them. If you mention another blog post in yours, link to it and make sure your software sends a ping. You can also accept pings so your readers can see who is talking about you.
9. Notify blog search engines each time you post. Blog software generally makes this easy. Make sure your blog is at least pinging ping-o-matic (send pings to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/). Ping-o-matic pings many of the major blog search engines. Also consider pinging these other services.
Optimize Your Individual Blog Posts
1. Add social networking links. Add a few links to popular sites like Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. This allows your readers to easily share your post with the rest of the world. You can add graphical buttons or icons, or simple text links, but as with the news reader subscribe buttons, don’t go overboard.
Social networking links - increase your blog visibility
2. Add an ‘Email This’ link. Add a link that allows your users to email the post to a friend. FeedBurner can provide this functionality. See ‘Simple Invitation with FeedBurner.’ (Once you’re on the page, look toward the bottom for the code example.)
3. Add tags. Add tags to your posts that are relevant (and hopefully) high-volume search terms. You’re probably utilizing your blog’s built-in categories, and that’s great. However, categories should be used as an organizational tool for your specific blog, and might be terms that a user searching on Technorati, or another site, would never use. For example, this blog has ‘Rants’ as a category, but it’s doubtful that somebody searching for ‘Rants’ on Technorati will really be looking for our blog’s subject matter. Utilizing tags in your posts increases their chance of being found in searches. Make sure your tags are acknowledged by Technorati.
4. Show related posts. Provide links to other posts in your blog that contain similar subject matter. As with recent posts, 3 - 5 should suffice.
5. Consider using sticky posts. A sticky post is one that always remains at the top of a category, archive, or tag page, regardless of newer posts. Using a sticky post allows you to keep a keyword rich post at the top of a specific page, such as a category page. This gives the page a better chance of ranking well in the search engines because you can more easily optimize it for targeted keywords, and it allows your readers to see your best post at the top of the page when they first visit.
6. Include targeted keywords. This is pretty obvious, but worth repeating. Include targeted keywords in header tags and in your body copy. Bold keywords where appropriate - this gives search engines (and readers) more indications about what keywords you’re targeting and what keywords are important.
7. Use ‘alt’ attributes in your
tags. ‘Alt’ attributes should describe what the image is about in case it cannot be seen (by text-only browsers and vision impaired users), and because search engines can consider ‘alt’ text as body copy. Of course it goes without saying that attributes should include targeted keywords, but remember to only use them when they are relevant and appropriate. For example, the ‘alt’ attribute for the first picture in this post is alt=”The other ‘Gone Wild!’ web site founder” which does not contain any targeted keywords.
Though the title tag of this page is ‘Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines’, we both know there’s always more to be done. That being said, if you at least follow these guidelines you’ll definitely have a head start toward increasing your blog’s visibility.
In addition to our list of 8 important steps to increase your blog traffic, here are some simple, easy-to-implement blog optimization guidelines to help ensure your blog’s freedom and visibility.
There are three main areas to consider when optimizing your blog:
Feeds, Your Blog as a Whole, and Individual Blog Posts.
Optimize Your Feeds
(Read my post on optimizing your RSS and Atom feeds in Wordpress.)
1. Use full text rather than partial text. When your post is viewed in a reader, like Google Reader, make sure your feed is set to display the entire post. The click-through rate for full text vs. partial text in feeds is basically the same, and there are a variety of other arguments in favor of full text feeds. See what Scoble says about this.
2. Show 20 posts. If your blog software defaults to showing 5 or 10 posts in its feeds, then increase it to 20. It’s simply more content for new subscribers and more chances your posts will get passed around.
3. Add categories at the feed level. Normally each individual post includes categories, but it is possible to include categories at the feed level too. View the RSS2 spec.
4. Add an image or logo. Although this feature is not well supported in the different feed readers, it is simple to implement. Adding an image to your feed makes it stand out from the crowd. Adding a logo to your feed is an easy way to reinforce your brand. Here is a great tutorial on adding a logo to your feed.
Logo in feed - blog optimization
5. Enable autodiscovery. If you use just about any browser other than IE 6 or earlier, then a chicklet will show up in the browser URL bar if your feed is autodiscoverable. Add RSS autodiscovery. Add Atom autodiscovery.
Autodiscover chicklet - part of blog optimization strategies
6. Consider using FeedBurner. FeedBurner offers many free services like SmartFeed, FeedFlare, and MyBrand. You can also track subscription rate (while not exact, you can still monitor trends) and a variety of other statistics.
7. Validate your feeds. Once you’ve made changes to your feeds, be sure to validate them. Fixing any errors found during validation will help to ensure your feed is compatible will the variety of readers out there. Validate your feeds here. Chances are the results will contain a couple of warnings. Fix these if you can. The important thing is that your feed is valid.
Optimize Your Blog as a Whole
(Read my post Optimize Your Wordpress Blog as a Whole.)
1. Use custom page titles. If you could only make one change while optimizing your blog, this should be it. Customize every page title in your blog, especially your home page, by including important keywords.
2. Use keyword rich URLs. If your URLs (permalinks) contain search unfriendly query strings like “?p=180,” you need to change your blog’s permalink structure. Most blog software allows you to change the default permalinks to include post titles, categories and tags instead of the cryptic query strings. You can take this one step further by manually customizing each post’s title, i.e. if you want your URL to be different than your post title, you can manually change it to something more concise and/or search friendly. For example, the default URL for this post would be:
/blogs-gone-wild-optimization-strategies-to-ensure-yours-is-of-age/
but I changed it to:
/complete-blog-optimization-guidelines/.
3. Add news reader subscribe buttons. Make it easy for users to subscribe to your blog. Adding buttons for the more popular feed readers gives your users a single click solution for subscribing to your blog. However, don’t go crazy and add 4 million buttons. It’s visually unappealing and confusing for your readers. If they have too many choices, chances are they won’t make one!
News reader buttons - increase your blog visibility
4. Add a Technorati button. Face it. Technorati is the authority on blogs. You definitely want your blog listed on Technorati, and you should make it easy for your readers to ‘Fave’ your blog (add it to their Technorati favorites).
5. Offer email-based subscriptions. This enables your audience to receive your content via email as opposed to using a feed reader. Many (if not the majority of) people are still unfamiliar or not comfortable with the concept of feeds. Of course it depends on your particular audience, but you should consider offering an email-based subscription.
6. List most recent blog posts. Make it easy for your readers to see what your latest post titles are. Show 3 - 5 titles.
7. Add a Google Sitemap. Make your blog readily visible to Google.
8. Ping other blogs when you are talking about them. If you mention another blog post in yours, link to it and make sure your software sends a ping. You can also accept pings so your readers can see who is talking about you.
9. Notify blog search engines each time you post. Blog software generally makes this easy. Make sure your blog is at least pinging ping-o-matic (send pings to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/). Ping-o-matic pings many of the major blog search engines. Also consider pinging these other services.
Optimize Your Individual Blog Posts
1. Add social networking links. Add a few links to popular sites like Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. This allows your readers to easily share your post with the rest of the world. You can add graphical buttons or icons, or simple text links, but as with the news reader subscribe buttons, don’t go overboard.
Social networking links - increase your blog visibility
2. Add an ‘Email This’ link. Add a link that allows your users to email the post to a friend. FeedBurner can provide this functionality. See ‘Simple Invitation with FeedBurner.’ (Once you’re on the page, look toward the bottom for the code example.)
3. Add tags. Add tags to your posts that are relevant (and hopefully) high-volume search terms. You’re probably utilizing your blog’s built-in categories, and that’s great. However, categories should be used as an organizational tool for your specific blog, and might be terms that a user searching on Technorati, or another site, would never use. For example, this blog has ‘Rants’ as a category, but it’s doubtful that somebody searching for ‘Rants’ on Technorati will really be looking for our blog’s subject matter. Utilizing tags in your posts increases their chance of being found in searches. Make sure your tags are acknowledged by Technorati.
4. Show related posts. Provide links to other posts in your blog that contain similar subject matter. As with recent posts, 3 - 5 should suffice.
5. Consider using sticky posts. A sticky post is one that always remains at the top of a category, archive, or tag page, regardless of newer posts. Using a sticky post allows you to keep a keyword rich post at the top of a specific page, such as a category page. This gives the page a better chance of ranking well in the search engines because you can more easily optimize it for targeted keywords, and it allows your readers to see your best post at the top of the page when they first visit.
6. Include targeted keywords. This is pretty obvious, but worth repeating. Include targeted keywords in header tags and in your body copy. Bold keywords where appropriate - this gives search engines (and readers) more indications about what keywords you’re targeting and what keywords are important.
7. Use ‘alt’ attributes in your
Though the title tag of this page is ‘Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines’, we both know there’s always more to be done. That being said, if you at least follow these guidelines you’ll definitely have a head start toward increasing your blog’s visibility.
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