While there are many reasons to blog, there are two primary uses that are becoming more widespread with blogging: To game Google Adsense, and to also game the search engines for better rankings.

Since Blogs are known to the search engines as daily snippets of information that are updated on a frequent basis, they get a lot of preference in the search results.

So from this, how do you optimize your blog?

Depending on the service you utilize, there are still some basics that you can apply. The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger. If you are looking for an advantage with SEO, you should use Blogger since they are owned by Google, and you'll be indexed quicker.

Blogs aren't all that much different than a site. The power of a blog is from the frequency of the posting. If the search engines see a pattern of 3 postings per day, they will be very active on spidering that site. Depending on the topic of the blog, you may be able to boost your blog in the rankings if it's related to a hot topic on the Internet.

Now, to the actual optimization.

Since blogs are typically a few pages long, you only need to establish a few rules that will be applied sitewide:

* Use an interesting title - Also known as linkbaiting - your title should captivate the user to read more
* Try to use your blog keywords in the title - while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant
* Use the H1 tags - All blog editors allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags
* Link to other blogs - Find other related blogs that your readers might find interesting, and ask for a link in return
* Don't forget about your archives - You may post a topic that isn't hot at the moment, but comes up later - make sure your readers can find that posting

As stated above, the key to a successful blog is frequent postings. You don't need to write up an article everytime, two paragraphs and maybe some resource links is what a typical posting should be comprised of.

-To your online success!

Paul
www.SEOforGoogle.com

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Blogging is great, but should be done naturally. All the little terms you can rank for can be achieved if you're really into what you are writing about and others view it as valid.

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seo - The World Economy. Or is it?

You also are missing some info & have some incorrect info.

b2evolution and myspace are also very large.

Having a blog w/ Blogger will not get you indexed any faster, all the same SEO rules apply.

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Do the others allow them to be hosted on your own domain?

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seo - The World Economy. Or is it?

I can say yes on all except myspace (it might but I don't really know anything about it). With wordpress or b2evolution you need to be able to use php & mysql on your server but you have 100% control over EVERYTHING. We use b2evo on many sites and have gotten very proficient at modifying pretty much every aspect of it, but if you spend some time with wordpress you can probably do the same things.

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While you guys are on the subject I'm using word press. Do any of you guys know any plugins that will create static URLs or any other plugins that will help me out seo wise?

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I haven't really dealt w/ WP but I'm sure they have something. Check their forum.

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I've been searching around for a while and haven't found anything yet.

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Maybe someone will know on Blog Party and Blogger Talk, that's where a lot of the blogging specific tech questions are being asked and answered. I don't know of any off hand.

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seo - The World Economy. Or is it?

I took a quick look at their (word press) blog and the answer is yes, you can make spider friendly URLs...it's probably just a setting in the admin side. I know b2e has a setting that does the same thing, but then we still have to modify the source code to really get the most out of it.

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