ContentRobot

As we head into the final quarter of 2007, we offer a variety of ways to get your blog noticed.

1. Start with a Great Design

Your mother was right — first impressions do count. An eye-catching professional design will go a long way toward:

• Showing you are serious about your blog (and care about your readers)
• Branding you (and your company) properly
• Attracting new and repeat visitors (who may be encouraged to subscribe to your content)

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Looking for a great way to attract those search engines to index and rank your site? Check out these WordPress plugins to help you spread the word about your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps
This nifty little plugin will allow you to index your blog to create a sitemaps.org-compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog - most importantly, this sitemap is supported by Google, MSN Search and Yahoo!. While it doesn’t create a physical sitemap page, it traverses your blog’s content and automatically builds an XML report that search engines can easily digest. Our only complaint? It slooooows the site’s administration down when saving posts, due the sitemap being rebuilt.
>> Read more about Google XML Sitemaps
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Linkbait: verb: describe a variety of practices that have the purpose of generating links to your site.

Want to get people to link to your site? Here are five linkbaiting techniques to consider:

1. Tools - offer useful, fun or cool tools that webmasters can use on their blog. Don’t forget to point them back to your own.
2. Quizzes - quizzes, surveys and tests are popular with web users and can be quite viral. Make them fun and humorous!
3. Contests and Giveaways - create something for people to participate in. Ask interesting questions related to your topics.
4. Design - design something that others can use. A great blog theme, for example, can send the links your way.
5. Coolness Factor - write posts that are provocative, gets the scoop, exposes something, etc. While coolness can be very subjective, it can also be very linkable.

In reality, the very best way to get others to link to your blog to continually provide interesting and unique content. But it’s great to add some fun with some of the methods noted above. Blog on.

Need more search engine food? Here are some other things you can do to get those search engine robots to index your blog.

Part 4 of 4: Miscellaneous Strategies

Domain Names
Choose your domain name wisely and try to include your keyword in it if possible. Have fun at register.com or your favorite domain registration site to research and find appropriate domains you can use.

Google says it looks at at the length of your domain’s registration in ranking it. That’s because many spam sites have short registrations. By registering your domain for a longer period, it can indicate that you’re building a site of substance and are in it for the long haul.

Ping Services
Ping services will ping a variety of websites for you to notify them that you’ve updated. In doing so you’ll also be letting search engines know that you’ve updated which will trigger their robots to come visit your blog. At the very least insure that your blog is pointing to pingomatic, but there are many others, too.

Site Design
Search engines appreciate well laid out, well-coded and easily to navigate sites. Is your blog viewable on all major browsers? Do your pages validate with proper code?

This often means keeping it simple, so that search engine robots can index your site a lot faster and more accurately. That means go easy on the Flash or JavaScript (and no frames!).

Offsite Techniques
Try to send out a press release and write articles for a relevant publications just might indirectly help your SEO efforts.

What’s Next?
ContentRobot hopes this series takes the fear out of search engine optimization. Sorry to say, but an “if you build it, they will come” hope just doesn’t work online anymore. Good luck!

See the previous entries in this series: Part 1: Quality Content, Part 2: Linking Strategy, and /or Part 3: Submit Your Blog to Search Engines and Blog Directories.

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.

Submitting your blog to search engine and blog directories is a good way to attract visitors to your blog. Here we discuss where to list your blogs.

Part 3 of 4: Submit Your Blog to Search Engines and Blog Directories

Submit to Search Engines
Have the search engines found you yet? While a bit time consuming, you may want to take the time to sumbit to various search engines.

Each search engine has its submission procedure, but often you just submit the main URL that you want included in the index.

Try Google, Yahoo!, and/or dmoz.org

Submit to Blog Directories
Submit your key pages with appropriate keywords in the links to blog directories. There are a bunch of free directories out there.

Try Blogarama, Blogdigger, Blog Search Engine, and/or
Technorati

Bonus Tips
By submit your RSS to MyYahoo or Google’s personalized pages, it can help to get indexed on Yahoo! and Google.

Be wary of the services that offer to submit your sites for you. You often have to pay for the priviledge and your results may be better than theirs.

Bottom Line
In sum, if your onsite SEO techniques haven’t gotten you listed in the search engines and blog directories yet, take the time to submit them yourself.

Next up, we’ll wrap up with Part 4: Miscellaneous Methods. And don’t forget to see Part 1: Quality Content and/or Part 2: Linking Strategy.

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.

The way Search Engines index your blog is by sending “robot” crawlers to your site to track what you’ve written and follow the links. Here we discuss how linking both inside and outside your blogs can help you with search engine optimization.

Part 2 of 4: Linking Strategy

Get Inbound Links
Every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site. The best inbound links? These are from higher ranked sites than your own, that are relevant to the topic you are writing about, and who link to you using relevant keywords. Find them and try to get them to link to you.

Use Outbound Links
Linking out to quality relevant sites that your readers might find useful can also help search engines index your site. While this can be an effective strategy, remember to weigh this against the fact that this may end up sending some traffic away from your blog.

Also keep in mind, too many outbound could have detrimental impact upon your blog. Above all, don’t forget to link to only reputable and relevant sites.

Interlink Your Site
Make it easier for those robots to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely. You can do this simply by providing some sort of a site map or listing your blog’s categories in your sidebar.

Further, make sure every page or post links back to your main page and/or any other important pages on your site with an intuitive navigation scheme. Note by highlighting them this way, they can become some of the most highly ranked pages simply because they are linked on every page of your blog.

Finally, consider linking to older posts (or use the ‘other relevant posts’ feature) to point readers to a topic you’ve previously written about before.

Buy Links
Some professional webmasters purchase links from other highly ranked and relevant sites. If you have the budget, you may want to consider this as part of your linking strategy.

Bottom Line
In sum, think about your links as part of your search engine optimization strategy.

Next up, we’ll have Part 3: Site Submission Techniques. And don’t forget to see Part 1: Quality Content.

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.

Because blogs naturally offer new content to search engines, you might think you can skip optimizing your blog. In our latest series, here are some ideas you can use to attract search engines to your blog.

Part 1 of 4: Start with Quality Content on a Specific Topic

Quality Content
The best way to get links to your blog is to write quality content that people will want to read. This is still the cheapest and probably safest approach toward to build inbound links in a natural organic way because others want to link to quality content.

Keyword Rich Content
Consider: “How will I want people to find this post in Search Engines?” What will readers type into Google to find the information on the topic you’re writing? Use your answers to identify a few keywords (go for 3-5) for the article you hope to get highly-indexed. Then pepper those keywords throughout your post, as well as in titles, heading tags, image alt tags, and meta tags.

Try for One Topic per Post
The more tightly you focus the theme of a post, the better for Search Engine ranking. If you find you are writing a long post that covers a number of loosely-related or different topics, contemplate breaking it up into smaller, more-concentrated pieces. Note that research shows that longer articles can have a pretty steep drop off rate in readers after the text gets below the ‘fold’ or to the end of the first screen of article.

Write Optimal Length Posts
Now that you don’t want to write posts that are too long; don’t make them too short either. Search Engines just might pass them over. A good rule of thumb: 250 words per post will give it some length, meatiness, and keyword density.

Bigger is Better
It’s true that bigger sites tend to rank better than smaller sites because Search Engines see your site as more comprehensive. Also, the more pages you have, the better your odds of being found in Search Engines. However don’t just to put up random junk content be or be spammy and duplicate your content everywhere either. Work at building a large site over time.

Update Regularly
The more you update your blog, the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This will mean your new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. This is a natural benefit of blogging – make the most of it!

Next up? Part 2: Linking Strategy

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.

Is your blog lonely? You’ve been blogging for a while, but no one seems to be adding to your conversation. Here are five ways you can entice the blogosphere to comment on your blog …

1. Invite Comments Via Email - Sending out an email invitation can be helpful toward getting the conversation going. Choose people who can effectively add to the discussion not just your “buds.”
2. Ask for Them at the End of the Post - Simply say, what do you think? or what is your experience with? These types of questions can encourage shy readers to contribute.
3. Comment on Others’ Blogs - This method can lure readers to join in your thread and send them back to your blog for more.
4. Write Quality Content - Does your content invite discussion? Are you writing unique posts? Taking the time to scoop or adding your own special twist to your stories can bring in traffic and additional talk.
5. Be Controversial - Get people to respond (in kind or not so kind) by poking fun of something or acting a bit nutty. Be careful, however, and limit your use this strategy, or be forever flamed.

What do you say? Enter your comments below!

Now that you’ve started a blog, how do you get those readers to come over and read what you have to say?

Think About Your Content
Go beyong a diary and plan out a content strategy. What will you write about? How often will you post? How will you market what you’ve published? Strive to produce content that matters.

Get a Scoop
Break a big story and get a bunch of inward links and your traffic will flow exponentially. You’ll earn respect (street cred) and build a reputation for being someone in the know.

Keep the Conversation Going
Comment on other blogs and put your own spin on the story. And don’t forget to acknowledge comments on your own site - even if it’s stinging criticism. You can also add your own two cents in a personal email. Once you’re a part of the conversation, you’ll never know where it will go.

Help People Stay Connected
Include RSS feeds, email newsletters, RSS to email subscription services, as well as encourage readers to bookmark pages.

Ask for Help
Stumped about technology? Need help with design? Just ask. The blogosphere is full of people who can assist you in taking your blog where you want to go. Never forget to reciprocate when you can.

~ Inspired by a post found at Guy Kawaski’s blog.

Recently, guru Seth Godin published 54 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Site. ContentRobot offers some of the best ones that apply to business blogging.

1. Use lists.
2. Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
3. Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
4. Coin a term or two.
5. Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.

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