Introduction

“If you build it, they will come.” Or will they? They won’t if they can’t find you.

I’ve run a few different blogs and blog-like sites over the years, and I’ve picked up some things along the way as to how to get better rankings in the search engines. I plan to write follow-up articles to this, dealing with more topics relating to SEO’ing your blog later down the line, hence, this is Part 1.

For my first post here at BloggerSkills.com, I’ll set five basic ground rules that you should follow to get the most out of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your blog. While no one can promise #1 results, past experience has shown me that these methods work best for top rankings.

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a term used to describe the steps one would take to make sure their web site gets good rankings in search engines. There are many companies that make a living off claiming to be able to get any site to the #1 spot on google. Perhaps for their domain name, this is possible, but in the real life, the domain name is probably not what anyone is going to search for anyway. Users are going to search for your content. Thus, it is highly important to get your content optimized to provide the best possible results in the search engines.

SEO can be split into 3 basic categories:

• On Page
• On Site
• On Web

On Page focuses on keywords, layout, and markup structure. This will be the main focus area on this part of this article series.
On Site focuses on duplicate content, url structure, and internal links.
On Web focuses on links-in, links-out, pagerank, and other related issues that are more “promotion” techniques than actual optimization of your site’s content or layout.

Rule #1: URL Formats

By default, most blog programs come with some method of mod_rewrite for search engine friendly URL’s. However, sometimes the options they give you are not ideal for SEO. Wordpress, which is what BloggerSkills.com is on (and just so happens to be my favorite blog software), gives a couple of options, with their main focus being on a datestamp style URL, ie, http://www.bloggerskills.com/2006/07/14/sample-post/. It looks great, but really, who searches for a date? The words you want in there are “sample-post” and possibly the category, depending on how key-word intense your category name is. On my personal blog, I run a category/post style URL:
/%category%/%postname%/index.html
Paste that into the custom block on WordPress. (Your software may vary.) On BloggerSkills.com, We have opted to go for just the post title in the url.
%postname%/
Our categories here are VERY broad, and probably won’t help much with SEO, so we decided to leave them out.

Word press also gives a numeric option, a la http://www.bloggerskills.com/archives/123. This also is counter productive. “Archive” has nothing to do with the topic at hand, and the number of the post id is completely irrelevant to the content. If you want good search engine rankings, you need to use the post title in the URL.

Do not use the datestamp style or numeric style URL’s that are pre-fab options on WordPress. Go with a custom style that includes the post title (%postname%). If you are worried about possible dupe’s (ie, 2 blog posts with the same title) adding the post id can be done at the end of the url string:
/%postname%-%post_id%/
Which will form a link like: http://www.bloggerskills.com/sample-post-123/. The keywords are in the URL, and the number will make sure your users are directed to the proper article, should two exist with the same title. There’s a ton of pre-made %tags% for you to use to make your own custom URLS. The WordPress Codex houses them with many examples, but be wise in choosing a URL structure. Again, if you do not use WordPress, I’m sure your blog software homepage has information about this as well.

Rule #2: Use Short, Keyword-Intensive, Descriptive Titles.

Since the Title of each post goes directly to the URL, and also the h1 tag on the page, it is crucial to use the best possible description of the article. The title I chose for this post is a short and sweet “Blog SEO”. However, thinking ahead, I am planning to write at least one more follow-up to this article sometime in the future. Since we don’t use the post_id in the URL’s, I thought ahead of time, and actually named this “Blog SEO Part 1″. I think that just about covers what this article is about, and it ensures I can write other topics down the line with “Blog SEO” as the first bit of the title with no worries.

Rule #3: Don’t let your layout get ahead of you

Keep it simple. The more complex and image-intensive your make your design, the worse off you are. The things to consider are two-fold. First, Google, Yahoo, Msn, and all the other search engines can’t “see” images. They can only “read” text. And while you can (and should) assign an alt=”" attribute to all your images, they have less weight than straight text does. If you have to use an image, consider using one of the many image replacement techniques. Secondly, using straight text requires a lot less code. This effects what is known as the code to content ratio. The more markup you page has, the more muck the SE’s have to sift through to find your contextual content. Use as much semantic xhtml as possible (ie, strong instead of b, em instead of i, p’s for paragraph text, ul and ol for lists, h1,h2, etc for headings, etc) and avoid tables where ever possible (unless it is truely tabular data of course). Keep all styles and presentational markup in an external stylesheet. Keep all javascripts in external linked files. The less code it takes you to make your page look the way you want it, the better.

Rule #4: Avoid external links to bad sites

To get the highest PageRank (PR), you want links in to your site, but very few links out. However, you can still link to every page in the world and still maintain PR by adding a simple tag to your URL’s:
rel="nofollow"
View the source of this article, and you will see that I have added these tags to the anchor elements to the external websites I’ve linked throughout this article.

This is a widely debated topic. An article by Jim Boykin suggests that so long as the site is “Trusted”, it is ok to link to. So, perhaps using prudence when linking is the best policy. Linking to a Wiki page, or to the NYTimes most likely won’t hurt you. But, be weary about linking to some fly-by-night sites that may turn into a popup farm over night because they forgot to renew their domain name.

Rule #5: Remember 128

128 characters is all you get to attract a visitor to your site. After that, URL’s and titles turn into “…” on the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages). Keep your URL’s short, your title’s short, and your description short, but most of all, make it concise. The more accurately you can describe your content in the least amount of text, the better off your blog will be.

Conclusion

This should get you started. Next time, we’ll cover moving content with 301’s and get into more detail about the On Site and On Web aspects of SEO. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment.

-Brian Cummiskey
SkeyMedia