Finding good blog posts is difficult. It's not that they aren't out there, they are. It's that many aren't rising to the top in those pesky search engines. But, for those of you with good blogs that could use a boost in the search engines here are a few Search Engine Optimization Tips.
Search Engine 101
Before we get into how to optimize your blog, let's talk about the basics of what a search engine does. We usually see the end result of a lot of work when we go to a site like google or yahoo, enter our search terms, and search for results. Before you can preform a search a search engine is going to do a few things. First, search engines crawl your site. This is where spiders (a.k.a bots) scour the web and look at the code. Next, the search engines index the pages they crawled. So, if your page isn't crawled then it won't be indexed. In indexing, the search engine stores the code that is your page in a database for quick and easy access. After the content is indexed, your pages will be ranked for certain key words depending on your URLs, content, and code. If someone else optimized their code better than you, they will get a better ranking than you. Finally, search engines process requests for key words and generate a list based on ranking.
The Title In Your Title
The title is an important part of the blog post. When you look at the top of your browser you can see the title for the current post. For some blog engines the post title will come before the site title and in others the post title will come after the site title. The more optimized way is to have the post title come before the site title. If you are using drupal this is built in (look at the title of this page and you will see what I mean). For a site running wordpress to make this happen the theme needs to be tweaked. In the header file put in:
<title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { ?> - <?php } ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>
Technorati Tags: drupal, wordpress, SEO, google, yahoo, blog, blogging, search
