Optimizing Your Blog for Search Engines

If you are interested in driving more traffic to your blog maybe you can learn about search engine optimization, the first thing you should do is create useful, compelling content. The next thing you should do is make sure that content is easily found in search results from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Movable Type does a few things automatically that are very helpful to getting ranked higher in search engines. For example, Google likes pages that are well structured, with header and title tags, and with lots of text. The default templates in MT ensure that the pages of your blog are well structured with H1, H2, and H3 header tags, and even title tags that include the name of the entry in them.
Here are some additional steps you can take:


DO's

1. Pick easy-to-reference titles for your entries. If your entry is about armadillo sleeping patterns, use "Armadillo Sleeping Patterns" as a title for your entry, not "Desert Dozing". Search engines work off of "keywords". Think about what words people would use to search for your entry and then use those words in the title. This advice goes against the conventional wisdom of having "catchy" headlines for your blog entries. Catchy or obscure titles are fine if you have an established readership like some of the more popular bloggers out there. But if you want to attract people who may not know you exist in the first place, and you have content that would be useful to them, keep the entry titles simple and straightforward. Put keywords in your titles.
Make sure your the title tag in the header of your individual entry archive template includes the name of the entry.

2. Use keywords in the text of your entries. Again, think about what words people would use to search for your entry and make sure those words appear at least once or twice in the text of the entry.

3. Link to other bloggers who share your interests. They just might link back to you. Google PageRank, which is what determines who shows up first in Google's search results, depends on inbound links to your site, and to each page in the site. (See this useful explanation of PageRank.) Exercise caution in asking a fellow blogger to exchange links with you however; many don't do link exchanges as a matter of principle.

4. In the same vein as linking to other bloggers, provide external links to resources of similar or complementary content. Almost everyone knows that the way to score higher in Google rankings is to have other sites linking to you. What isn't as well known is that Google also considers the external links you have placed on your site. A good content site would have links to other sites of similar content, right?

5. Put a sidebar with links to your archives on all of your templates. The more pages that link to an individual page, the better. So if your blog pages all have links to your monthly or category archives, and those archives have links to the individual pages, this raises the page rank for those individual pages. It will also make it easier for your site visitors to find your archived articles.

6. Link to related entries. If you have other entries on your blog that are related to a specific entry, link to them from that entry.

7. Keep your printer-friendly pages from being picked up by search engines. You want search engines to find your fully formated pages with external links, etc., not your print pages or pop-up pages with lists of trackback references. You also don't want search engines to penalize you for duplicate content. To keep a page from getting indexed in a search engine, place the following meta-tag in the header section of the HTML for your printer page index and your TrackBack Listing template:


For more information about how this works see http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#meta.
Note: Once I had this tag in the headers of my individual archive pages by mistake, and sure enough over the course of a month my hits from search engines declined 80 percent.


DON'Ts

1. Do not try to scam Google or other search engines. Do not sign up with link farms, or schemes to drive traffic to your site. You might find yourself getting kicked out of the index all together.
2. Do not link to a site that you don't trust. Inbound links won't hurt your page rank, but if you link to a known spammer or scammer, that will hurt your page rank. In fact, before you link to an external site, check the site and make sure that it is well maintained and legit, and also not over-run by spam itself

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