In Day 25 of his 30 Day Create A Blog Plan, Michael Dunlop shares more secrets on how to make a blog easier for search engines to find.

He also shares a couple of great resources and articles so make sure you go and check out Day 25 on his blog too!

We discovered one good “trick” when my ex-business partner Judith Morgan posted about “property mentoring” and included the key phrase in the title of her blog and the first line of the post, and obviously included it in her tags (having been well trained by me!). Result? Six weeks at Page One of Google for the key phrase – presumably in the UK. She attracted one new client worth thousands of pounds over the year.

I thought this would be a good time to summarise my usual steps to make sure the search engines find – and keep finding – your blog generally and your posts in particular.

1. Install All-In-One-SEO plugin and configure it for your blog
2. Install the WordPress Plugin which not only ensures more blog directories are pinged, but makes sure you don’t OVERPING, thus getting banned as a ping-spammer.
3. Write your post, then think about which key phrase is most appropriate to target, then make sure that key phrase is included in the title of the post and the first line of the post, not forgetting the tags of course.
4. Filling in the All-In-One-SEO boxes at the bottom of the page? I’m not sure about this, my ADD usually stops me doing it as I’m bored by then, but I did hear on a podcast with a top blogger that it helps with SEO so it’s up to you. I will probably experiment when I swap over to blogging daily on The Business Success Factory in the New Year.

I also thought this would be a good time to summarise the results so far of the impact of blogging every day (and sometimes more than once a day) on traffic for this blog, as I have now, for 25 days. The numbers are slightly skewed by two pre-scheduled JV mailings but overall I think I’m up. I was averaging 250-300 unique visitors per week before I started and I’m averaging 300-350 per week now.

In contrast, all the blogs that I haven’t added new content to, are down on traffic this last 30 days on the previous 30 days.

Nicola, does this mean that I will for ever be having to add new content to my blog to keep the traffic coming?

Well, a year or so ago I would have said “no, when you get to a certain amount of content, you will get a steady stream of traffic” but now…….I’m pretty convinced that, in order to keep traffic coming and growing that traffic, you will need to add blogging to your other traffic generation methods. The good news is that it doesn’t need to ALL be unique content, but at least one quarter to one fifth of it, does need to be fairly unique content.

It still seems to be easier in local markets to beat the more established sites, with WordPress sites on your own hosting, and blog functionality with constantly updated relevent content – just ONE of the reasons why I’m focused on local business marketing this year, both growing a business in my own area, and mentoring people to want to offer local business marketing in their area too.

<<< Day 24 | Day 26 >>>