Christ Smith has just taken the stage. We will begin coverage immediately. Please refresh this page to see more coverage as it unfolds.
Chris Smith specializes in local optimization. He contributes to SearchEngineLand.com and WebProNews.com.
Optimizing Your Blog
Beef up your internal hierarchical linking structure
- tag clouds and tag pages (ultimate tagwarrior plugin)
- related posts (contextual related posts plugin)
- top 10 posts
- next & previous posts
Build inbound links
- add technorati tags to your posts (claim your blog first)
- get onto bloggers' blogrolls
- trackbacks and comments won't help with link gain in most cases
Compelling Illustrations make articles interesting. If you post photos to Flickr and link to your blog as a source of the photo, you can get some traffic and rankings from it. Photos need to be visually engaging.
Hop on a PR Feeding Frenzy
- hop on it early
- say something significant (don't just rehash the same info)
- link over to other top blog posts (Google blog search)
- watch top stories mentioned by Techmeme and comment on them
Note: I know people who have done this and made money strictly from this.
Research Jeff Crilley for tips on gaining publicity.
Link to your blog from LinkedIn.
Title Tags
- put your blog name at the end of the title tag, not the beginning
- tag name should go in the title on a tag page
- customize with additional keywords for display only on your home page
- override title tags with a custom one (SEO Title Tag plugin) (note: his company, NetConcepts, created this plugin)
URLs
- Rewrite to contain keywords, using hyphens not underscores
- 301 redirect from yourblog.com to www.yourblog.com (canonicalization)
- maintain legacy URLs even after switching blog platforms
Keyword rich domain names and blog titles are helpful.
Anchor Text
- make the post's title a link to the permalink page
- internally link back to old, relevant posts within the body of a blog post. use keywords for your anchor text
Header Tags (h1, h2)
- category names on category pages
- yes for post titles, no for post dates
Sticky Posts
- always appear at the top of the page
- adhesive plugin
Add author profile page and author links for group blogs
Add nofollows to trackbacks and comments where you don't vouch for a site.
Ping search engines with each new blog post – pingomatic.com, etc
Optimizing Feeds
- use full text, not summaries
- 20 or more items (not just 10)
- multiple feeds
- keyword rich item
- brand name in the item
- compelling site description
End of session. I need caffeine.
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