Blog Optimization is an important strategy if you’re running a blog. We’ve compiled a list of 10 must do blog optimization tactics.

Look good- It’s important to invest some money to make your blog look good. Get rid of the default template right away. Ideally get your blog skinned to match the rest of your site but if funds are tight at least find a good looking template and customize the CSS & header image to match your sites look and feel.

Learn to spell- In this day and age there is no reason to have misspelled words. If your browser doesn’t have a built in spell check at least copy and paste into word to check.

Update regularily- Keep your blog active. The best way to get people to keep coming back to your blog is to give them a reason to. Update the blog on a daily basis if possible.

RSS Marketing- Optimize your RSS feed just like you would optiimize your site. Make the RSS subscsription button obvious and user friendly.

RSS Metrics- If you can program custom metrics for your RSS feed thats always the best but there are pre-made solutions out there as well. The most popular is Feedburner and it has a large amount of metrics that it tracks.

Be Social Network Friendly- Make it easy for your readers to add your blog or blog post to their favorite social networking platforms. Digg, Delicious, Magnolia, Facebook, Stumbleupon is a good start and you can expand that list as you see fit. Read our post about making your site social media friendly.

Link within your site- Tie your posts together with links to other posts. This will help you with indented google listings. Get one post to rank and then write another that links to it.

Nice URLs- Besides making the URL more search engine friendly it also helps in getting the site spread through the social web. Many people copy and paste URLs into instant messaging programs and having the URL contain the title of the blog post gives people an idea what the post is about and should hopefully entice them into reading it.

Syndication- Most blogging platforms will allow you to automatically ping various blog indexes when you write a new post. Make sure you use this feature as its an easy way to get your blog more exposure.

Sticky important posts- If you write a post that is very authoritative on a subject sticky that post so it stays to the top. This will keep it highly visible for any of your readers that aren’t daily visitors. Just make sure you remember to unsticky it as your regular readers will get sick of seeing it after a while.

If anyone has any blog optimization tips leave them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.

Tags: Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, rss-applied, RSS-content, RSS-feeds

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 7:31 am and is filed under Blog Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.