Getting Listed On Search Engines Part II - Blogs

The best way to get listed and rank high is to use as many SEO techniques as you can. The happier you make the search engines the higher your pages will soar in the result pages.

The Art and Zen of Blogging
Search engines really enjoy blogs because they have RSS feeds, frequent content updates, lots of links. On blogger if you have post pages enabled in the archive settings it will create a search engine friendly named page from your title and link off of your front page for each post.

Try to start off with about 5 to 10 content rich posts before you start pushing them to the search engines. Make sure these are not just copy pasted articles from other peoples websites. You can use other sites for ideas about writing posts but keep the words your own. Plagiarism is frowned upon in school by teachers and staff, plagiarism is also frowned upon by search engines.

To further make them exciting to search engines create a free feedburner account and encourage people to subscribe to your site by adding the chicklets for My Yahoo!, iGoogle and RSS. Create a Yahoo! account if you do not already have one and add your feed to your My Yahoo! and make sure it is on top of all the others. Addition of your RSS feed to a My Yahoo! will give you a higher chance of being indexed by yahoo and likewise for Google.

Also the addition of a digg button for each article is nice, digg will create a page with a link to your article where people can leave comments. Make sure you digg your own blog posts so digg is aware that your post exists. Your title and description should be relevant to what your post is about.

If at all possible try to get some people to link to your blog too, the more links to your pages the merrier. Just make sure people use the keywords you are wanting to dominate in the links to your sites.

So you have about 5 to 10 entries with relevant wonderful content. How do I tell the search engines I exist?

Blog Pinging
There are services that exists strictly for finding new blog entries and publishing them. Rather than waiting around for these services to come find you pinging tells them, "Hey! I have a updated by blog come spider me!". In order to do this you must execute a blog ping.

Depending on your blog service, whenever you publish a new blog post a ping is sent out but to only a few search engines There are websites which will alert a bunch of blog search engines for you. These "blog pinging" websites should only be used for blogs, otherwise it is considered a spam ping and you will upset the search engines and pinging services. Also do not ping more than once per blog post, you tell them where you are and they will eventually get to you.

When you do a ping make sure that you select relevant services, if you have a blog all in english do not ping non-english services. Also make sure you select the big blog search engines:

• technorati.com
• Google Blog Search
  
• my.yahoo.com
  
• blo.gs - owned by Yahoo!
• Feed Burner - owned by Google

Some of the blog pinging services have different search engines included in them. I personally like to use the Blog Flux Pinger for pinging and some of the non-pinging blog tools provided by pingoat.

• Pingoat - Does not require registration and has some nice tools other than blog pinging. Spider simulator, sitemap.xml generator, keyword analysis
• Ping-o-Matic! - Does not require registration, strictly just a blog pinging utility. They report statistics on how many pings have been issued
• Blog Flux Pinger - Requires registration and requires that your blog be at least a week old or have 5 entries. They provide a bunch of other services such as a directory, page rank checker, free custom polls, and a bunch of web hosting service reviews. Also supports all of the 5 search engines that I listed above as being important.

Questions, comments and criticism are always welcome, search engine optimization and web development are life long learning adventures.