You’ve decided to start a blog on your favorite topic. Great! Where do you start? There are so many options out there – what steps do you go through to make sure your blog is set up in the most user and search engine friendly manner?

Recently, we started a blog about travel destinations across the US, Canada and Mexico. I kept a journal of the stops and starts we made along the way. I’m not going to go into the details of my endless pages of ranting about my very flat learning curve – but I wanted to share the things that helped, and the things that DIDN’T help to alleviate some of the frustrations I felt in the beginning.

First the Good things:

1. USE what you have – build your blog on a subdomain of your main site. By associating your content with an established website, you bypass the “aging” time most new websites must endure before achieving good rankings.
2. Choose software that works for you – I’m a WordPress girl. I’ve tried others (MovableType, Blogger, and Joomla) and they were just too confusing for me. I don’t have much background in HTML or coding, so I needed something that would be easy for me to use and modify without having to take a CSS class.
3. Use Keywords in your post titles – Okay, don’t just blog on topics that relate to great keyword phrases. When you write your title, think about how you want a searcher to find that article in the SERPs. If your post is about the wide variety of Widgets available, it is feasible that someone would possibly search for “Widget Variety” to find your article – use that. We use a SEO Title Tag plug-in (see #4) that makes our post title the title tag for that post’s page.
4. Utilize plug-ins to assist you with optimizing your posts. Not only do we use the Title Tag plug-in, we also use plug-ins that allow us to put unique keyword and description tags on every post. This allows the extension of basic SEO practices to your blog posts.
5. Take advantage of slugs. Post slugs allow you to insert a topic or keyword phrase into your URL. (Use www.blog.yourdomain.com/blog-setup-basics.html instead of www.blog.yourdomain.com/?p=187.) Implementing this has been the bane of our blog – originally it was set up to not use post slugs (I didn’t know what they were.) Then, when we figured out we wanted to use these, the software would not let us switch back. Make sure you select this option before you make a post or you might have to start over again. [I’ve been told this is due to the server we host the blog on - apparently it’s a windows server and we need to move it over to a Linux Server. I’ll keep you posted - C]
6. Enable Pinging. Pinging sends a signal to the search engines to come take a look every time new content is added to your blog. This is a great way to make sure your content is spidered quickly and will help get your posts ranking right away. We get good rankings in MSN within a week or two for semi-competitive keywords. With a traditional website, you could wait 2 weeks or more for the spiders to even find that new page, let alone index and rank the content.
7. Submit to blog directories – There are a million out there – do a simple Google query for “Blog Directories” and start submitting. Read the directions carefully – sometimes they only want your RSS feed URL.
8. Blog frequently to add fresh content to your site – If you cannot commit to at least two posts a week, a blog is probably not going to be as successful for you. After posting two posts a week for a few months, you can probably back off to one post a week, but fresh content is what a blog is all about.
9. Always check you blog after making a post or a change and be prepared for occasional blow-ups. Learning what caused it the problem and figuring out how to fix it is part of the learning curve.

What NOT to do:

• Don’t start out building out 100 pages that you don’t have time to put good content on. Generally, pages show up in navigation, so the old adage “Keep it simple stupid” is important. Use posts & categories to arrange your information, use pages to feature static content that doesn’t change. We use static pages for things like Road Condition links and Travel Resource information (passports & such.) We built pages for each state, but the navigation is horribly out of control so we have to go back re-work that.
• Enable post slugs from the beginning – see #4 above. Don’t put yourself in the position of having to back up and start over because you can’t get something to work.

Overall a blog is a great choice for getting the word out about your products or services. You don’t need to know any Front-Page or Dreamweaver, you just load it up and go. Setting your personal blog-o-sphere up for success in the beginning will help you reap rewards down the road.

Categories: SEO, Blogging.
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