e-bloggers.comLearn How To Monetize Your Blog And Make Money Online

Introduction

The quality of a blog’s content surely rules its popularity. Nevertheless, it is common for the finest pieces of writing to obtain very low SEO rankings.

It is important that the bloggers follow a certain set of techniques to ensure that their content gets more visibility through search engines.

SEO Tactics

In the blogosphere jargon, the SEO techniques for blogs are basically divided into two categories: on-site and off–site.

On-Site Techniques

These are the techniques which a blogger needs to implement while building a blog. Here we discuss the top 10 on-site techniques a blogger can follow.

1. Primary keyword and Domain Name- It is important to ensure that the blogs URL contain the primary keyword in question. You can also use the concerned keyword in the subdomains. For instance, if you are planning to start a pregnancy info site, then the primary keyword your URL should carry is the word ‘pregnancy’ .e.g. www.pregnancyknowledge.com

2. Primary keyphrase and title- Going by the example above, the words pregnancy and knowledge should appear in the blog headers such as H1 and H2 tags as should the title of each of your posts.

3. Keyword rich body of the post – Using secondary keywords in the body of the post frequently ensures the relevance of the page for someone searching with those keywords. However, repetition in excess might cause the Google bots to remove your site from the index.

Besides, avoid using duplicate content on multiple pages and maintain optimal length of your posts.

4. Anchor text of links – The primary and secondary keywords should be used often in the anchor text links when linking to the other blog posts or to other pages of the blog. Keywords placed in the links are more valuable than those in the simple text.

5. Themed clutters – The chances get better if you have a substantial amount of pages on a similar theme. It is advisable to keep a topic/niche or a theme for your blog.

6. Navigation bar – Another major tip is to ensure that the navigation bar is present on all the pages of your blog. This will make it very convenient for the search engines to spider your blog. Besides, the previous popular posts should be linked to all the pages.

7. Consistency- You need to maintain consistency in updating your blog to get top rankings in a shorter duration. You also need to keep your domain name and the topic selected for your blog same throughout or else you will end up losing readership and traffic.

8. Domain registration – It helps to register your domain name for a lengthy period as this also influences how the search engines react to your site.

9. Ping – Use services that will ping a variety of websites for you and notify them that you’ve updated your content. In this manner, the search engines will also come to know of the updates, thus to your advantage.

10. Submit to Search Engines – After you’ve taken all possible steps to make your content search engine friendly, make sure you submit your URL to be included in the index for the search engine to know of your presence.

Off-Site Techniques

Off-site techniques are those that function from outside the site and are beyond the blogger’s control, but it’s important to be aware of these.

• Obtain backlinks- The most prominent and powerful technique is to try and obtain as many backlinks as you can. To build pagerank and to get your blog rank higher in search engines, you need to get as many links as possible link back to your posts or blogs.

What are Comments?

The Comments feature is a part of the blogging software that provides visitors with the ability to attach instant feedback to a specific blog host.

Enabling the comments feature on your posts would mean that people who read your blog will be allowed to submit their own text or ‘comments’ in response to what you have posted.

Once the comment is posted on your blog, you also have the provision to edit, delete or hide the comments as per your discretion.

Who can comment?

Most of the sites observe the following pattern for allowing users to comment:

• Only registered users: Posts for which only registered users can comment.

If not registered, the system will prompt the commenter to sign in, if it is a

free site.

• Anyone: Any visitor to the site can post a comment.

• Only members of this blog: If it is a Team Blog, only members of he

specific blog can post comments.

How to be a good commenter?

To build your online social capital and become a great blog commenter, you need to come across as a knowledgeable, informative and friendly individual. Here we list a few simple guidelines to become a good commenter:

1. Focus on topic – Bloggers enable comments on their specific posts so that the commenter can add to the content of the post. Don’t stray away from the subject and talk in line of the blogger.

2. Add a new point to the discussion – If there are ten people in one thread and all of them voice the same opinion about the post, the thread itself is rendered redundant. Make sure your comment offers some new perspective or point to the ongoing conversation.

3. Comment only if you have the content – The blogosphere labels those who comment for the sake of commenting as spammers who do so just to add their name and URL. So post a comment only if you have something valuable and substantial to add.

4. Comments vs. Emails – A wise commenter knows the difference between a comment and an email. A comment is a non-personal public conversation while an e-mail is a private interaction. You need to be clear whether you want to add a comment or send an e-mail, based on your content.

5. Don’t flaunt knowledge – Knowledgeable as you might be, its unacceptable for a commenter to flash around his wisdom, especially when contradicting another commenter. Even when pointing out an error of another commenter, be subtle and respectful.

6. Be clear – Don’t expect your audience to imply meanings from your statements. Exaggerations, in-jokes and sarcasm are undesirable in the commenting community. How you use your punctuation marks can also alter the meaning of the sentence altogether.

7. Anonymity – Though commenting anonymously can be necessary at times, it can also convey wrong messages to your audience. Be bold enough and build your identity by placing your name and blog address wherever you can.

8. Brevity – Longwinded text across paragraphs are a big put-off. Be straight, crisp and to the point in what you want to say instead of making a huge narrative background.

9. Cite Links – When you are referencing someone else’s work while commenting, don’t forget to cite links and give due credit to the primary source of material.

10. Observe courtesies – Even if someone’s comments irk you beyond limits, stick to the basic rules and norms of netiquette. Be respectful and objective in your approach, regardless of any provocation, whatsoever.

What is RSS?

RSS is a web content syndication format, from the family of web feeds and specified in the XML language, called an RSS feed, stream or channel. It is primarily a format for syndicating news and content of news-like sites.

RSS feeds are mainly used by news websites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation RSS is used to refer to the following standards:

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)

• RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

History

Prior to RSS, many similar formats existed for syndication, but most of them were designed to be able to work only with a single service.

The first version of RSS, the RDF Site Summary, was created by Dan Libby of Netscape in 1999. This version came to be known as RSS 0.91 (Rich Site Summary, 0.91). It was in the year 2003 that The New York Times first offered its readers, ability to subscribe to RSS news feeds related to various topics.

The RSS version in use confirms to the norms of the World Wide Consortium (W3C).

Utility Features

RSS has today evolved into a popular medium for sharing content between sites, including the likes of BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet and many more.

Web feeds are widely being used by the weblog community to share the headlines of the latest entries or alternatively their full text. The feeds also allow the users to attach multimedia files. Major news organizations including Reuters, CNN, PR Newswire, Business Wire and the BBC now use RSS feeds in their operations.

RSS feeds are now also being increasingly used for multiple purposes including marketing, bug-reports and other activities involving periodic updates or publications. Infact, RSS is one of the easiest and most economical ways to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships.

Channel Elements

At the top level, a RSS document is a element, with a mandatory attribute called version. This specifies the version of RSS that the document conforms to.

Subordinate to the element is a single element, which carries information about the channel (metadata) and its contents.

Here’s a list of the main channel elements required:

• Title: This is the name of the channel. It’s how users refer to the service. If the information of the HTML website is same as that of the RSS file, the title of the channel should also be the same as the website’s title. For instance, ABC.com News Headlines.

• Link: The link is the URL to the HTML website corresponding to the channel. For instance, abc.com/

• Description: This is a phrase or a sentence describing the channel. For instance, ‘The latest news from abc.com, a XYZ-Daily website’.

Some of the optional channel elements are:

• Language

• Copyright

• Managing Editor

• webMaster

• pubDate

• lastBuildDate

• category

• generator

• docs

• ttl

• rating

• image

• textinput

• skipHours / skipDays

Sample

This is what a typical RSS feed looks like: