There is little point in writing a blog if no one comes to read it. Blogs are automatically search engine friendly because of their fresh content and clean formatting, but there are a few easy techniques you can use to improve your rankings.
A few words about keywords:
1. Choose your Keywords wisely.
You can choose to write on a topic, or for a key word or phrase, that is immensely popular and has a ton of competition, and never stand a chance of getting in the top page or two of rankings. Or you can choose similar but more targeted keyword or phrase with less competition be in the top 10 listings.
2. Key Word or Phrase? That is the next question.
Most people do not use a single word for a search engine query. The often search a phrase or even type an entire question. This is not necessarily the most efficient way to search, but it is the most natural. So do not think you need to limit yourself to single key word. A key phrase of three – five words is entirely appropriate.
3. Choose your URL wisely.
Once you have chosen your keyword, it is time to choose your URL wisely. Whether your blog is hosted by your blogging software, on your own domain or subdomain. You want your primary keyword to be in your domain name (URL).
4. Keyword Placement
Besides having your primary key word in your URL, you also want it to appear the header tags and titles of your posts.
5. Keyword usage in the body of your post
When writing each post you of course want to use your primary keyword (s) in the text, but do not over do it or you'll sound like spam. Always write in a natural, reader friendly manner. This is also the place put a few secondary keywords as well.
6. Keywords in Links
Keywords that appear in links are more important than those in plain text. So where appropriate, when linking to another blog or website, use your keywords in the text of links.
7. Keyword Categories
Another natural place to put your keywords in your Category names.
Keywords are not the only thing search engines consider when ranking your blog. Here are few other areas to consider:
Links
Links that point to your blog and posts are very important to building pagerank.
1. Search Engines and Directories
Being listed in search engines and directories provide great single direction links. So make sure you submit your blog, first of all to dmoz.org. This is end all, be all to internet directories and is a place that most search engines pull from to find websites to spider. After than submit directly to the major search engines, that way they know you exist. Finally, submit to the blog search engines and various free directories.
Here is a well-rated list of Blog Directories by Robin Good.
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55
2. Articles
Turn some of your blog posts into articles and submit them to the article directories. This will get you more links.
3. Comment
Leave appropriate comments on forums and other blogs with a link to your site in the comment.
Updates
1. Update your blog.
The more fresh content you have, the happier the spiders are. Some blogging software will even let you write posts in advance and schedule them to be posted on certain days.
2. Ping
After you update your blog, you'll want to "ping" the search engines to let them know you have new content. That will get your site spidered more often. You can use the Ping-O-Matic Tool ( http://pingomatic.com/ ) to ping a lot of search engines all at once. Alternately, if you use Feedburner, for your RSS distribution, they have a tool that will automatically ping the search engines when you update your blog.
Follow these few easy guidelines and see your blog listed in the search engines in no time.