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This is #4. Optimize your blog for the search engines. This looks to be a bit more work than the other ones particularly since I run three sites, but let's give it a whirl.
Although I am doing this on all three of my sites I have to make the posts a little different on each for several reasons. One is that Google penalizes for duplicate content across sites. PayPerpost and some of the other paid advertising sites also want you to have content unique to the sites as well. I do post unique and sometimes relevant content, but too many of these on the sites all looking the same is just not a good idea for those reasons.
The first thing I am supposed to do is go read How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines by Darren Rowse (Problogger.com). OK, I'm going right now...
There are several points to Darren's article but they are summed
up in most of my posts on SEO that I have done in the past, whether
they were paid or just stuff I was writing for myself. Looking for
traffic. Where does traffic come from? Good quality back-links on
search engines as well as other sites. What qualifies as a quality
back-link?
- they are from higher ranked sites than your own
- they are relevant to the topic you are writing about
- they link to you using relevant keywords to your page
OK, that stuff makes sense, but how do you get these kick-butt links to your site? Several different ways...
1. Quality Content. I am already screwed :( One man's quality is another man's quantity I always say...We're talking about blogging, OK? That makes sense. If someone puts up a post that I find interesting I link to it. Very simple. I can't force that to happen, it's a natural progression of events. I've linked to other sites and had them link to me.
2. Notify Relevant Bloggers of Your Content. There are different ways to do this I suppose. You could email them and say "hey! I liked your article and linked to it, go check out mine on the same subject." I don't think I could do that but it is one way. Track-backs are good for this, particularly if you participate in open track-backs and the links show up in the post as I do.
3. Use Directories. I don't do this a bunch but I am listed in some of the blog directories. Darren links to Ari Paparo's big list of blog search engines as a starting point. As soon as I am finished posting this I will go and submit all three sites to the ones that I have not used yet.
4. Inter-Link Your Blogs. I am part of several loosely bound blog networks and blogrolls, and I also have all three of my sites hosted on the same server and regularly interlink them, but that's about it.
5. Buy Links - I have not tried anything like text-link ads, although I do get a few out-clicks on the ones that I host here. I am still on the fence as to whether it is worth it or not. Back at the end of May I spent $100 of the money I earned online and bought some reviews through Payperpost. I posted about the experience here. I think that if I were to do it again, I would use PPP Direct and choose the bloggers that I would want to post a review because it was most definitely not worth the money. Another example would be some of the reviews that I posted about my brother's book earlier in the year. He also used PPP at one point and had several posts on the Internet and with the exception of people coming from my site and maybe one or two others he also felt that it was a waste of his money.
6. Swap Links - I have done some of this as well. I don't do it all of the time as my blogrolls are particularly long and I generally only like to link to people whose blogs I like when I read them. With millions of blogs around, I like quite a few of them.
The article has quite a bit more useful information that I am not
going to repeat here but you should go check it out. Darren at Problogger is a gifted writer and very good at what he does.
