30 Ways to make your blog better friends with search engines

Wether you are starting a new blog or fortifying your current blog. Having all these 30 tips is a major way to get higher rankings and staying there.

1. The beginning and the basics

Whenever you start a new blog, I love doing these things. They make the building of a blog more fun. If its for the new bloggers who haven’t experienced this before, sometimes it can be a bad experience, but its vital for your blogs success on the internet.

 

2. SEO friendly URL’s

The first and most basic is that you make your URL’s friendly. This means that it isn’t full of PHP code, search engines hates seeing this “http://www.url.com/jokes=?p/page1.php”, plus it looks ugly.

3. Valid code

Unfortunately search engines don’t look at websites the way we do, they only look at the code of the website, if you really want your site to be good friends with Google or another search engine get it xhtml valid. This won’t budge you up in the ranking’s at all though.

 

4. Domain name related to the niche

On the search ranks its an extra boost to have extra keywords in your domain name.

 

5. Keywords in your title

Its great to have your niches keywords in the title of your blog, its useful specially when trying to rank for these keywords.

 

6. Build links to your blog

There are many of ways you can build links to your blog, the only thing is stopping you is the effort of actually building them. Here are a few ways to build links.

 

7. Directory submissions

Submit your blogs to directories, it doesn’t make much of an effect at first. Though there are some directory submission services out there which work, sometimes.

 

8. Email related blogs

Most of the times other blogs or sites which is related to yours don’t give free links, but theres no harm giving a few sites an email, it doesn’t cost you anything.

 

9. Link bait

Make an article, free themes, an application or something that will attract people and will link to your blog. It has to be something interesting, they aren’t going to link to garbage!

 

10. Small linking can help

You can also add your blog to forum signatures, wherever you are an active user expose your blog there. I know I get a lot of traffic from Digital Point from just my blog in my signature.

 

11. Content on your blog

You can’t have a blog with no content, if you have loads of content on your blog Google will automatically love your site.

 

12. Unique content is the way

Search engines love unique content and plus nobody likes looking at articles that they might have already seen at another blog. Don’t copy cause you could also get yourself into a lot of trouble via Copyright.

 

13. Spelling and grammar

Double check or even triple check before you post a new entry to your blog. Its very unprofessional for your readers to look at and Google dislikes spelling mistakes and it has a nasty effect on the search engines.

 

14. Appearance of your blog

This isn’t for search engines, but its mainly for your readers and it still is vital for your blogs success.

 

15. Use a theme that isn’t too dramatic

By dramatic I mean, too many tables or too much colour. Some readers like loads of colours and some don’t. So keep it at an neutral colour.

 

16. Pop-ups and advertisements

Refrain from using advertisements and especially pop-ups, Google hates looking at the code of pop-ups ads. Plus your readers don’t want to be scrolling through a river of adverts to try and find your content.

 

17. Include images in your posts

To make your posts looking more intriguing and make it look interesting you can add an image but not too big.

 

18. Optimize your theme on Wordpress

For better results in the ranking you can use the following to make your blog even better.

 

19. Clean your code

Every so often check your themes code, try and make the header and footer clean as possible and visible to see links.

 

20. Some things you might not have done

Things that you might not have heard before or even thought to do for your blog.

 

21. Comment on other blogs

If Google spider sees a link on another blog it helps you rank, not because you got a backlink because most blogs have “nofollow”.

 

22. No,Index some pages

If you have pages that you wish that your readers should only see then edit your meta tag to No,Index.

 

23. Link within your blog

It helps to get your blog get more spidered, specially linking to other parts of your blog that Google’s spiders might have not visited yet.

 

24. Overuse keywords in content

In your content make certain keywords bold, at least 10 of your keywords you would like to rank in Google for.

 

25. Alts and Titles

Most thing people forget about in their blog, make sure you use alt’s in your blogs images and links outbound and inbound has titles with your keywords in them.

 

28. Other SEO tips for your blog

Other tips that don’t fit anywhere else that can help your blog on its verge to success on search engines.

 

28. Use tags to your advantage

Tags are basically an extra keywords to your post, only use keywords that are about the post you have made.

 

29. Make a SiteMap

Create a site map for your blog, it helps Google spider revisit and see your pages inside out.

 

29. Use H1 on titles

On your post or page titles use H1 rather than the default on most themes which is H2 or H3.

 

30. Link exchanging is a no

Don’t be link exchanging, its very bad for SEO, but you can make exceptions for your Blogroll. Do not use it within content.

 

31. Buying and selling links

Refrain from buying and especially selling links, if you get caught Google has a nasty punishment on the search engine.