SEO For Bloggers – A Beginners Guide For Google, By Google
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo) -
After creating a very basic guide to SEO, Google has also provided more assistance to bloggers this time in the shape of a best practice / guidelines for bloggers – a sort of blogger’s beginner guide to SEO/Google.
- Write well and often (depends what you want to achieve!)
- Follow Google webmaster guidelines
- Categorize your posts (I’m testing out not doing this at the moment on this blog)
- Make sure users (and crawlers) can easily find your blog (doh!)
- Limit comment spam on posts (just watch who you link to)
- Tips for affiliate sites
- Create descriptive titles for each of your posts (doh!)
- Connect with your online community (What a blog is really good for)
- Publish a full RSS feed of your content (I use Feedburner with Hobo SEO Blog feed) and you should probably check out these tips for increasing subscribers.
There’s a bit about Webmaster Tools too, but this isn’t necessary at all as you do not need to submit a site to Google Webmaster Tools. I know a few very high profile SEO who don’t ever 
and this advice won’t help bloggers identify problems on their blog so they missed an opportunity there.
Too Basic?
Actually, this is very, very basic stuff – perhaps the point. If I were new to blogging, I’d certainly get to grips with the above, and then read
Running a blog, while different, is not that different to running any website when it comes to ranking in Google. You still need an intelligent website structure, Pagerank and original optimised content to rank.. and of course links from other websites.
Be sure to check out our comprehensive SEO Basics guide.
We've recently updated our comments policy and increased the number of comments a visitor has to make to get seo friendly links in comment signatures to reward long term readers and make it a bit harder for dofollow spammers ;) - I told you dofollow spamming wasn't a long term strategy....
I have gone through the Guide. This is really basic thing a site owner should know. Google did this because it wants to provide more relevant results to its users and it could be helpful to the users as Google is the most popular search engine.
I thought of a good experiment on this topic and wanted an experts opinion. I wanted to see which article directory held the most weight for several given topics. It would be great if someone wanted to do this experiment, but put identical or near identical articles on 10 different well known article directory and similar sights, and targeting the same keyword that had very little competition, then see which article ranked above the others. These articles would not be linked to anything. What do you think? Or has this already been done? let me know. P.S. It would be great if I could shamelessly throw a link on here to my blog and website on Law Firm Marketing Tactics.
Shaun
I have visited your site a number of times and found it to be very helpful.
Could I be so bold as to ask if there are any good, free sites where I can create a simple web page, say for setting up my own business or just self promotion?
Ideally I would like to have one with no adverts!
It’s just something I’m toying with at the moment and would be greatful for your help.
Thank you
Are you talking about Self Hosted Websites like http://www.wordpress.com, or http://www.blogger.com ?
You can certainly post articles and images etc – but building a business website on a domain somebody else ultimately owns is questionable in the long term.
Good for practice although, and to drop yourself a few links to your real website
Shaun
At this stage it’s more about networking and putting myself on the market (from a business point of view). I can then link build to it.
Both of those sites look great!
Thanks
No problem Mathew. I prefer WordPress, but both are good for links to a real site
I bet there are a bunch of bloggers peeved that the info contained in their e-books they use as bait to hook subscribers ain’t so special anymore.
One of my big problems is knowing what comments are ‘good’ and what ones are ‘bad’. I have been caught out a few times by a site I thought was fine only to check it a week or two later and its turned into a link farm or a p*rn site.
I have now become much more vigilante in what comments I approve.
I started blogging 16 weeks ago and my google pagerank is still 0.How often is pagerank updated?
Shaun
As I am leaving my current position I want to set up my own site for which I can link build and promote.
However, I have already used a number of phrases for my current office’s web site that I want to use for my new one.
For instance when I type ‘Matthew Franklin Shropshire’ into Google UK it brings up references to my current office web site.
If I keep using ‘Matthew Franklin’ as a link to my new site how will this affect my new page rankings and networking?
Thanks for your continued support.
Hi,
I have started blogging before 4 months back so i have to say that i am new to blogging!
Your article seems to be very useful to improve my blog further!
thank you!