It’s a well known fact that keeping an active blog as part of your website is an excellent way to attract the positive attention of the major search engines and draw in some of that highly coveted visitor traffic.  But some blogs are better for the search engines than others—here are the top 5 ways to make your blog more search engine friendly…

1.  Optimize Each Post For A Specific Keyword Topic.

It’s easy enough to hop on your blog and just start rambling about the happenings of the day or week.  This isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s not really taking the fullest advantage of the potential that’s out there via the search engines.  In order to best capture the focused attention of the search engines for any given post, you’ve got to construct the blog post with focus too.  The best approach to doing so is to loosely construct each post with a certain keyword phrase in mind—and be sure to use natural variations and synonyms of that keyword throughout the blog post as well.

2.  Be Sure You’re Completing Meta Information For The Post.

Many blogs don’t allow the user to make this accommodation, but it’s extremely important to help the search engines understand and properly list your blog posts by providing Meta information like a great Title Tag and Description Tag.  In fact, it’s been speculated that the Title Tag alone is the single most important component of any post when it comes to the search engines—and unfortunately, by default, most blogging software just leaves it blank or fills it in automatically with some random information.  Ask your provider about how you can submit a descriptive SEO-optimized Title Tag with each and every post you write (here at Sleepless, our programmers always include this feature on the blog’s back-end).

3.  Take Advantage Of The Post “Tags.”

Again, most blog software will allow you to fill in a field that contains tags—a.k.a. your top keyword phrases for the post.  By doing so, you’re effectively having your blog software create additional website pages based around each one of these keyword phrase tags that can be captured and listed by the search engines.  Sure, they’re not given the same priority of treatment by the search engines than your actual blog post itself does, but they do help you attain an additional level of search exposure with absolutely minimum additional effort.

4.  Use An Image For Each One Of Your Blog Posts.

Image search accounts for a healthy and ever-increasing number of searches.  By including a topically-related image with each one of your blog posts, you’ll be doing double duty when it comes to getting more attention from the search engines (and your potential visitors).  Be sure to rename your image with a file name that uses a topically related keyword from your blog post—and also try your best to use your blog software to add a keyword-based Image Title Tag to the image as well.  This will help the search engines match up your image and blog post with the topic it should be listed for.

5.  Update Your Blog Often.

Don’t blog to the point where quality suffers significantly, but do blog as often as your time and writing ability permits.  Search engines love blogs that are constantly adding fresh, new, top-quality content.  It helps them keep their visitors happy by providing lots of relevant and engaging information when they do their searches.  Again, the exact schedule you should keep is really up to you—but you probably don’t want let it go more than every week or so for best results.

You’ve heard about all of the benefits that having a blog as part of your overall online presence has, right?  Well if not, here are 3 great reasons to have a blog right off the bat:

1. Blogs are a great way to communicate in a more casual way with your visitors & customers.
2. Blogs attract good search engine attention to your website.
3. Blogs are a perfect hub for your social media campaigns.

So, since blogs are so great, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that going out and registering a new blog for your site would be a wise thing to do—right here, right now?

The answer might surprise you…because, actually this is potentially one of the biggest mistakes you can make with blogging.

When you start up a blog with a free service like Blogspot or WordPress.com, that blog when done right can and will attract its fair share of visitors and attention.  And while this sounds like a great thing, there is one very major caveat…all of that traffic it attracts will be sent to a blog service that is not part of your actual website.  In other words, you don’t actually own it, the blog service does.  With all of those posts you put so much time into, you’re actually just working for them!

So what’s the solution, you ask?

Simple enough.  Host your blog on your own domain.  Your blog should be a built in part of your website—just another page, if you will, that is entirely contained, coded, and hosted as part of your actual website.

There are lots of popular ways for your website developer to accomplish this task.  Sometimes a blog can be custom coded and written from scratch to be an integrated part of your website.  Other times, the best cost effective solution is to use open source software from WordPress.org to power this blog section of your site (it’s important to note the difference between WordPress.com, an offsite 3rd party solution, and WordPress.org, open source blogging software that you actually build into, host, and run on your own website).

When you run your blog within your website (as opposed to having it with an offsite 3rd party provider), there are some notable benefits that come into play:

1. All of that traffic that your blog attracts will be sent directly to your website; from there, your blog’s visitors can now interact seamlessly with the rest of your website and its important message.
2. All of the search engine credibility that your blog helps to grow and develop will now also reflect its weight on your actual website, not someone else’s 3rd party blogging service.
3. You fully own the blog content you create.  No longer is the content you’ve put so much time and effort into benefiting a 3rd party service instead of your website.  More importantly, since you now own it and it is on your site, you’re not privy to a blogging service being able to remove (purposefully or accidentally) your blog content that you’ve created at their whim.

A 3rd party blog is better than no website presence at all.  But in the end, the truth is very clear—in order to benefit from all that blogging has to offer, it is essential to host your blog on your own domain as a direct part of your website.

Your site’s blog is important.  Blogs are not the newest kid on the block any more when it comes to web media, but they are still one of the most effective tools out there for pleasing the search engines and your site’s visitors at the same time.  As a matter of fact, search engines love your blog.  Here is why:

Blogs provide a steady stream of new content for your site.

Search engines (and visitors alike) get bored fairly quickly with the status quo.  And when it comes to your website’s content, last year’s news and a stale “about us” page just doesn’t cut it.  Search engines know that humans want more than this—they’re looking for relevant, helpful, and up to date information.

Humans want their questions answered when they do a web search.  And the fresh stream of new content that your blog provides for your web presence is exactly the kind of up to date content that the search engines want to provide their customers—and ultimately your customers when they click through to your site.  It’s the exact quality of content and information they seek.  What is good for the search engines is good for your site, and blogs work perfectly for both.

Blogs tend to be less formal than more static web content.

And by informal, we could say that they are both conversational and original when it comes to their content.  Sure, some searchers and visitors are looking for your pricing data, or perhaps just your phone number—the standard static web page content on your site satisfies this need succinctly.

But the larger percentage of searchers are looking for something more.  And they might not know about you at all…yet.  Because blogs are friendly and easy to read, search engines and visitors alike can connect with the blog content formula.  And also because blog posts are less formal in nature, they tend to cover the kind of things that “real humans” are looking for when they do a search.

Blogs naturally provide search engine spiders with lots of good “spider food.”

When you write a blog post, it usually ends up going in the direction of your expertise.  You talk through your blog post much like you would explain a product or service to your customers one on one.  The expected writing style that a blog post encourages is just really conducive to natural quality content that search engines love.

The good news here is that you’ll usually end up using plenty of natural keywords and keyword phrases in your post…those strings of words and terms that are highly niche-oriented, but not forced or spammy.  When you try to force it and write just for the search engines, the written content can come across as really artificial.  Forcing too many keywords into your content just so it will come up highly in the search engines has a really manufactured feel to it that both search engines and visitors genuinely dislike.

But writing a blog post from the heart is just the opposite.

Just by sharing your professional thoughts, ideas, and other relevant information with your visitors through your blog, you’ll automatically be covering the necessary keyword bases without getting SEO-spammy like many web content articles do.  And natural content is a win-win for both visitors and search engines.

Again, when it comes right down to it, the search engines just want to provide their customers with quality niche information that is fresh and up to date for any given search topic.  Your blog, updated regularly and professionally within your niche, provides the perfect way for the search engines to provide their searchers with exactly what they want.  It is just that simple.

It happens every year—the greater blog community tries to rehash the same old question again and again…is blogging still alive or is it dead as a doornail (bonus points to anyone who knows what that old expression actually means).  Has it become a thing of the past?  Is it worth my time?

Well, let’s cut right to the chase—is blogging still alive and well in 2011?

You bet it is.

It’s kind of funny that these very bloggers that pose the notion that blogging is a thing of the past are blogging this message to their followers.  See the irony in that?

It’s pretty simple when it comes down to it.  It’s a popular topic and gets the doomsayers plenty of attention.

Here’s the cold truth:

Blogging is still and excellent way to get visitors.

Search engines love blogs—especially when they’re updated often with fresh new content.  Think about it for a second.  With each and every blog post you create that contains some kind of content or information of value, you’re hanging out your shingle for that very particular topic that the post covers.  A new blog post might not garner thousands of instant new visitors, but over time, the cumulative effect of having hundreds of blog posts—shingles hanging out there, if you will—adds up to respectable search traffic.

Blogging still helps businesses build trust.

SEO isn’t the only good reason to blog, or for our purposes today, to continue blogging in 2011.  Your blog is a great place to connect with your visitors and customers and show them who you really are.  Frequent blogging shows that you are indeed in business and you aren’t just a made-up web-only entity somewhere; instead, you’re real people with real personalities that make up a thriving, trustworthy, and legitimate business.

Blogging works seamlessly with social media.

This is probably where most of the “blogging-is-dead” hype comes from.  With the huge shift to social media over the last couple of years, some people have argued that this new way of connecting has replaced blogging altogether.  But the smart folks out there realize that this is just not true at all.  It’s quite the opposite actually—social media compliments blogging perfectly.  Using a hub and spoke model, where each blog post is a hub of sorts and social media updates can serve as spokes directing traffic back to the hub, blogging today has a more effective reach than ever before.

Blogging is easy.

What’s not to love about blogging?  It’s not some kind of SEO rocket science or anything like that.  Instead, keeping a blog going is dead simple for a modern business or organization.  Find something practical, relevant, or helpful to talk to your customers about and start talking through your keyboard to your blog.  It really is that easy.

So again, blogging is very much alive and well in 2011.  And it promises to be so for the foreseeable future.  Try not to let anyone convince you otherwise.

Choosing the right blog platform is not always that easy—not that it really should be all that difficult either.  Here’s the thing…between the major blogging platforms out there, many get confused as to what these systems and services actually offer and how they work.  Let’s try and clarify the confusion here a bit if possible…

The Big 3 Blogging Platforms

WordPress

Extremely popular among its users and professional web developers alike, the WordPress blog platform has certainly earned its position at the front of the pack.  Often a significant point of confusion, though, is the fact that there are actually two different variations of WordPress out there—WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

For those looking for a standalone blog system that’s free and already hosted, WordPress.com is the answer.  While this is great for those just testing the waters with blogging, mostly because it’s free and easy, there are drawbacks.  For example, going this route more or less ties you to using their system, their hosting, and often, their domain—the dot com version of WordPress is not very flexible for developers and power-users.

Enter WordPress.org.  For those wanting to integrate a top-tier blogging system with their websites—or perhaps even use the system to power their entire site—the dot org version of WordPress is hard to beat.  Dot-org WordPress is actually extremely stable and robust open source software that you have to install on your own hosting provider (that must meet certain requirements).  From there, a developer is free to customize and integrate to their heart’s content.  This is probably why WordPress.org is becoming as extremely popular as it is.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s entry into the blogging market.  While it’s hard to fault what comes from Google, this platform isn’t as pro-friendly as some of the others.  In other words, it’s created more for the average consumer—the person that just wants to start blogging without having to mess with all kinds of complex setup or anything of the sort.

Blogger is free—and most Blogger sites are hosted and reside on the service’s own servers.  From the standpoint of simplicity, all you’d really need to get started is to log in with a Google ID, pick a name for your blog, and pick a blog theme from the array that they offer.

Downfalls to Blogger?  Well, even though it was pretty much the first, it has lost some popularity with power-users due to fact that it simply isn’t as well-featured or easy to integrate with an existing site (like WordPress is).

TypePad

TypePad is another reasonable popular blogging platform.  As one of the top tier blogging systems out there, it adds a nice alternative choice to the above mentioned platforms.  While it’s secure, works as it should, and offers a good choice of quality designs to choose from, it is a subscription-based service with fees beginning under $10 per month.

This blogging platform can be integrated with your own existing website or can also be used as a stand-alone option through their provided hosting.  However, even when integrated into a third-party site, users still must manage the blog through TypePad’s service—this can be a hindrance for some.  The bottom line is that it’s probably worth a try if you’re not satisfied with the other options out there, even though it really doesn’t stand out as a best pick option for many.

Our Pick?

We knew you’d ask!  Here at Sleepless Media, we choose to use WordPress.org almost exclusively.  It integrates beautifully with our customers’ websites—and customization is practically unlimited.  Then there’s the fact that it’s been designed and tweaked from the ground-up by a passionate team of open-source developers to be faithfully SEO-friendly.

There’s a massive user-base out there, so any bugs or security flaws are quickly found and worked out by the masses—this also means that there are very frequent revisions and updates releases.  Not to worry though, because the platform integrates a one-click update option.  Just like “there’s an app” these days for pretty much anything, the same goes for WordPress.org—there’s a plug-in available to allow pretty much anything you can imagine.

Oh, and to top it all off, did we mention that WordPress.org is free?  It’s certainly hard to argue with this pick when the possibilities are nearly endless and the cost to access this excellent software is zero.  Although customizing, integrating with websites, and further development do come with a nominal price for time, skills, and expertise, all in all, the cost is kept to a minimum thanks to the head start from WordPress.