Blog Optimization

‘Blog’ is the contraction universally applicable for ‘web log’. It is a type of website where entries are made as in case of any journal or diary ad is displayed in a reverse chronological order. It can de defined as a frequent chronological publication of personal thoughts and web links. The word ‘blog’ can also be used as a’ verb’. It then means to maintain or add content to a blog.

A typical blog combines text, images and links to other blogs, web pages, and any other media linked to the topic. Most blogs are primarily text matters though some might focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vblog) or audio (ipodcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media. Blog can be summarized as a regularly updated online journal of information and opinions.

History of blog

Chronicles, commonplaces, diaries can all be termed as predecessors of blogs. A blog is often a mixture of all that is happening in a person’s life and that is happening in the web. It is a kind of hybrid guide site and there are as many links as there are people. That is the reason for innumerable blogs today.

The trend of blog gained force with the introduction of automated published systems most notably ‘blogger’. People use these services to simplify and accelerate the entire process of publication.

The modern blog actually generated from the online diary of yester years where people would keep a running commentary of their personal lives. These writers used to call themselves ‘diarists’, ‘journalists’ or ‘journalers’. Justin Hall, while still a student at Swarthmore College began blogging eleven years back in 1994 and is considered as one of the earliest bloggers. Brad Fitzpatrick is also an eminent name amongst early bloggers.

Earliest blogs were simply manually updated components of common websites. Now-a-days, use of a browser-based software is a typical aspect of blogging that can be hosted by a dedicated blog hosting services or can be used by running blog software such as WordPress, blogger or on regular web hosting services such as ‘Dreamhost’, ‘Hosterio’ etc.

History of the terminology

The term ‘web log’ was coined by John Barger on 17th December, 1997. After a relatively slow start, blogging considerably gained popularity. The site xanga was launched in 1996 and had about 100 diaries in 1997. But blogs have since then come a long way and studies show as on December, 2005 we had about 50,000,000 blogs. Today every day innumerable new blogs are created.

The changing face of blogs

Blogs which started of as personal diaries have now undergone a total makeover. It has gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping or enlightening new stories. The Iraq war saw bloggers taking such points of view which can never be coined under traditional left-right divide. ‘Blogging’ combined with personal web page with tools to make linking to other easier; specifically permalinks, blogrolls or trackbacks has emerged today changing the earlier blog scenario. These together with web log search engines enables bloggers of today to track the threads that connect them to other bloggers who share the same platform, ideology, areas of interest and thoughts.

Types of Blog

There are various types of blogs depending on the way the content is written.

Blogs can be:
 General (relating to anything) or
 Specific (related to a particular topic like travel blog or political blog.

Again a blog can be of the following type depending on the use:
 Private or
 Commercial.

Contents of Blog

A blog usually consists of:

• Title- the main title or headline of the post
• Body- the main content of the post
• URL or permalink of the full, individual article.
• Date- Post date and time when the article was last updated

A blog optionally includes the following:

• Comments i.e. discussion on blog entries
• Categories or tags i.e. subjects that the entry discusses
• Trackbacks or ping backs- links to other sites

Popularity of blogs and its measuring tools

Blogs are gaining popularity day by day. Researchers have analyzed the dynamics of the rising popularity of blogs. There are two types of measures to calculate the popularity of blogs:

• Measuring popularity through citations
• Measuring popularity through affiliation

It was reported by Chinese media Xinhua that the blog of Xu Jinglei received more than 50 million page views, claiming to be the most popular blog in the world. In mid 2006 it also had the highest incoming links of any blogs on the internet.

Legal issues on blogs

The emergence of blogging has brought a range of legal liabilities. The major areas of concern are the issues of propriety or confidential information and defamation. Several employers have fired employees who maintain personal blogs and have illegally discussed their employers, employment conditions, working environment etc. In Singapore two Chinese bloggers were punished for posting anti-Muslim racial remarks on their personal blogs.

Legal issues relating to blogs are arising in countries like Malaysia, United Kingdom and United States of America on a regular basis. Even in India there are instances of legal complications arising due to controversial content of blogs.

Blog and Search Engines

Blog Search engines are used to search contents from a blog.

Blogging software is a simple content management system (CMS) that easily adds new pages or links and integrates them into your site’s navigational structure and linkage making the access to these pages easy and convenient. Blogs are content rich and link rich regularly updated web pages that are usually search engine friendly.

Search engine optimization is based upon making a blog accessible to search engines to gather information stored in a database and to help the users to search the relevant websites cropping up as a result of search through the search engines. The goal is to make the crawlers of the search engines more efficient by providing more information to be stored in the search engine’s database.

RSS reader and RSS Feed

Basically a blog is just an area set aside for you to write articles that can be easily accessed with a special program called RSS reader. RSS reader is used as we can have all of the blogs that interest us in one place and there is minimal wastage of time while surfing the net.

RSS is a form of extensible Mark up language or XML. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed or web feed. The code used in RSS feed can not be deciphered by the website visitors. The web masters use tools to display content contained in an RSS feed.

A free RSS reader that can be downloaded is http://www.rsspublisher.com. You can also post your articles to http:/www.blogger.com/start to get your own free blog.

The dynamic nature of blogs sets them apart from any other online writing and makes it an effective business tool.

Reasons for optimization of blog:

1. To increase the rankings of the blog on both search engines as well as RSS search engines
2. To increase traffic to the blog.

How to optimize a blog?

 Code to be optimized for search engines
 Create links with other sites
 Primary keywords to be in URL
 Secondary keywords in body
 Anchor text of links in body of posts
 Use of categories and tags
 Submit your blog and RSS feed to directories/search engines

Simple ways to search engine optimization

There are simple ways to optimize your blog for search engines so that it can rank higher when compared to other static web pages. These are as follows:

1. Use of primary keyword in blog domain

Ensure that you use the keyword in your blog domain for your blog or host it on the blogging service or a sub domain of your site so that you are sure that your URL contains the primary keyword that you want to optimize. In case you want the keyword ‘wave’ get a domain with the name ‘wave’ like wave.com, wave.biz, wave.cc, wave-today.com, wave-news.com etc or use the keyword in the sub domain like http://wave.yourdomain.com. This ensures that the search engines can easily locates you and it means more hits on your blog.

It is always recommended to have the primary keywords in your blog as getting a domain with own name makes way for a good branding in case of a personal blog.

In case of a business, blog keywords in the domain or sub domain make the targeted traffic flow towards your site.

2. Use of primary key phrase in blog header

Use of primary key phrase in the blog header tags and the title of your posts in case of business blogging help a lot since the blog software consider these keywords and put them into the file name of the permalink posts that it creates.

3. Use of secondary keywords in the text/body of your post

Infrequent use of the secondary keywords in the body of the text helps the search engines to locate the page and link with them properly. But you need to be careful as incessant use and repetition of the same should never give an artificial unnatural look to your page.

4. Use of keywords in the anchor text or links

Using keywords in links has more importance than in simple text. It helps to use keywords in anchor text or links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages on your main website.

5. Ensure smooth spidering of search engines

Set up of the side navigation bar on all pages, easy access to your archives and previous posts from all pages of your blog etc makes spidering of search engines easy. As a result more traffic to your blog is possible.

6. Interlinks with others

Inter links with other blogs or posts are required to increase the page rank and more appearance in the search engine listings. Posting of legitimate comments and offer to exchange link with other similar blogs also help in creating flow of traffic.

7. Submit your blog & RSS feed to directories/ search engines

Submission of blog keywords to blog search engines and directories like http://www.dmoz.org or http://www.moreover.com gives quality links to your blogs. The others are:http://www.syndic8.com , http://newsknowledge.com , http://www.guardian.co.uk/weblog, http://www.genecast.com, http://www.freeaddurl.org etc.

8. Social bookmarking

These are excellent sources to traffic your blog. It must be made easy for readers to bookmark the pages that have to be located easily and on a daily basis. Social bookmarking can be done by adding some code to your blog template for each major social bookmarking site. Popular bookmarking sites includes Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0, Simpy, Scuttle, Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, BlogPulse .

9. Trackbacks

You can get links back to your blog by using trackbacks. This make the blog interactive as others can use to link back to your posts.

10. Regular updation

The search engine spiders can act more efficiently when the blog is updated on a regular basis. Addition of fresh content and updation of blogs frequently increases the probability of getting caught in the web of search engine spiders.

11. Use the same domain name

It is always recommended to use the same domain name as long as you publish. In case you change the domain there remains the chance that you might loose on your current subscribers who might not be aware of your changed address. Hence, you should stick to the same domain as long as you are into blogging.

These are the general blog optimization tactics. There are also optimization tactics specific to blogs. Optimization of blogs is an inexpensive proposition but ignoring to optimize it might cost a bit too much to your personal as well as business blog.

Blog Content- Points to be remembered while writing a blog

A blog can be made more reader friendly if we remember the following points:

1. Interesting information

The writing of a blog should be plain, simple and easier to understand. It must contain interesting information that people want to read. It will be an added advantage if the text can be made enjoyable and conversational.

2. Update frequently

People get more interest in reading those blogs that are regularly updated. Blog should be written on a regular basis so that the readers and the search engines visit you more often.

3. Make useful comments on your blog

The comments that you write in a blog should contain an element of value addition to the reader. Don’t make useless comments that offer no value to the blog post.

4. Write articles

The best way to promote a website is to write interesting articles. www.articlewritingtips.com/submitarticles.htm provides a list of article directories as a ready reference. You can also use paid article services like one available at www.freeuniquearticles.com.

5. Create a buzz

The articles that you write should be controversial or at least have the ability to generate interest in the minds of people.

Whatever optimization tactics are employed on a blog, nothing can substitute for quality content. Blog optimization and quality and usefulness of the content are interlinked. Blog optimization without quality check of blog content will not help in achieving your target.

Blog and e-mails

Generally 30% of web traffic is generated through e-mails. Readers are willing to read the blogs that are posted through e-mails. Now-a-days, free services are available for sending blogs through e-mails on a regular basis. The main advantage is that all the modifications on the articles can also be sent as and when updated which creates interest among the readers. You can use a free service like RMail, Bloglet or FeedBlitz to manage your subscriptions.

We can conclude that blog optimization is a technique of fixing code, writing the most appropriate key words and making your site an open door for the search engines to come, embark, explore and experience. It has provided a platform to people spread across nations and continents to share individual thoughts, experiences and insights.