Blogs and SEO

Hi all,

This is my first post here, though I've been reading the forum for several months.

I'm wondering, whether blogs are SE friendly?

Can you show me several examples of blogs that have good SE placements?

I prefer WordPress script. It's open source script, so I think that it won'd be hard to make it SE friendly, right?

Thanks in advance.

>examples of blogs that have good SE placements?
Mr. Dash won the nigratude ultramarine SEO contest with a single blog entry. Search for nigratude ultramarine.

>I prefer WordPress script.
Me too.

>it won'd be hard to make it SE friendly, right?
Just use the mod_rewrite option to produce static-looking urls. HTH.

- Mike T.

There is a great article on the use of blogs and search engines here:
http://www.organic-rankings.com/art...ngine-blogs.php

I recommend reading it if you would like to learn more why they work so well in the engines. Also you might also checked into MovableType blogs, they are quite search engines friendly and easy to install and modify.

blog is a great way to promote your site. But I think blogs themselves aren't SEO friendly. I can't have a title if I use blogspot.com's blog.

Dejaone,

Is correct in part, for the most part all you are able to do with a pre-packaged out of the box blogging system, is blog, and blog some more. They are not overall set up for the search engines, their main focus is content publishing in anyway your would like to do it.

However, blogs are an excellent way to promote your site, yourself, or whatever your have in mind. There are many ways you can turn around your search engine unfriendly blog. I mentioned above the Movable Type Blogging System. It is one of the most customizable interfaces out there. You can easily change it to suit your particular needs, and for the most part without much modification it can do well in the search engines.

Some things you can change should you use Movable Type.
1. Change the titles of new entries to Links. This communicates to google what the page is about.
How to:
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>">
<h2 class="title"><$MTEntryTitle$></h2></a>

2. Change the way url's are created. Instead of http://www.myblog.com/archives/000433.html
You can change it to:
http://www.myblog.com/I_think_this_is_great.html
or use hyphens.
How to (go into archive template):
<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

3. Learn to create titles that target traffic generating keywords.

4. Include headers on your front page

5. Obtain links from other blogs, websites, or directories.

6. Use links with keyphrases inside your content, link out naturally to useful websites.

7. Set up your blog so that the side navigation bar, is present on all pages.

8. Utilize the category system, so that new categories are added to the side navigation.

9. Make sure new entries appear under "current entries" or "recent entries" section in the side nav.

10. Set the time new entries stay on the homepage, from 2 days to 20-30 days, so they are picked up by the search engines.

This touches on some of the things you can do to make your blog more friendly to the search engines. Some of these same methods can be applied to LiveJournal and Blogger. If you can't seen to handle the technical aspects, don't worry hire a blog designer.

I use blogspot and have a title tag and other tags as normal.

In the control panel click on the template tab and alter the title tag and enter any other meta tags you want in the head section like you would any other html page.

I have two blogs that I have put little effort into that have PR of 3, a couple of links each.

They can be SEO friendly if you know how to edit them.

I've spent many hours editing blogspot templates and have an SEO'd one for most of the standard blog templates. If you look at one of mine like

http://resourceshelf.blogspot.com

Click on any of the individual posts and you'll see they have unique titles where the standard template has-

Blog Title - Post Title

Mine are-

Post Title

Although not important to Google I also added unique keywords meta tags and description (repeat of title).

There are plenty of little things you can do which improves the SEO of them.

Any of you guys played with bBlog?

It's php/mysql and Smarty based. IMO it's about as SE friendly as blogs can get..

Smarty is a php template system, it's VERY easy to work with. That's what did it for me when recently sourcing a blog script for my own drupal based site. (drupal has a blog module but it's nothing on bBlog)..

If you're reading this thread to find a good open source se friendly blog, i'd recommend it ;)

Nick

I just installed it at - http://www.search-engine-optimizati...co.uk/seo-dave/

Installation was easy when I read it correctly. One moan is the folder names, I misunderstood the instructions and only uploaded the installation folder (called bblog), so when I tried to access the blog there was nothing there (should of uploaded blog which includes bblog!).Better folder names would be better. I read the forum and someone else did exactly the same thing!

I don't think the basic template is any better than blogspot since like blogspot there are many fundamental SEO mistakes (like using the anchor text HOME!).

So if you are looking for an out of the box SEO'd template this isn't it, but then neither is any blog template, they all need significant editing. It does use headers well and the title elements are unique, though like blogspot you get the name of the blog in all titles.

Right now you can't get new templates easily, if you read the forum the code is under going significant changes and this apparently means any templates create now are unlikely to work in the future. So they aren't putting together a collection of templates.

There are templates available, but they aren't thorughly tested etc... so should be used with caution.

That said, I've only played with it for 10 minutes and looks like there are a few interesting options like different sections to a blog (i.e. news) that's totally lacking in blogspot. This would ease the problem of archive links on most pages that tend to 'water down' optimisation or results in over doing it with lots of highly similar anchor text (like you see with the blogspot blog I posted earlier).

I can see Bblog being a lot more versatile to those who understand SEO and PHP so I'll most likely create myself a few templates and use it for blogs (I own a LOT of blogs). I also look forward to seeing where this goes in say a years time as right now it's on version 0.7.4 so quite early on in it's development. I suspect it will be really good in the future.

But as it is, it's no better than blogspot without editing. So if you don't have the skills to edit templates I'd go with blogspot as it needs no installation, PHP or MySQL etc...

Thanks for your MT Tips Phoenix !!