Tuning Your Blog For SEO

I have a good friend who is thinking about starting a new blog that she wants to use as an informational blog and this is the reason I decided to write this post.

Tuning Your Blog To help With Search Engine Ranking


Search Engines and the way they decide on what to put at the top of the results can only be called a mystery black box and Nobody Knows Exactly All The Criteria Search Engines use for ranking A Page but we can at least guess about a few and this post is just one of those possible criteria.

All search engines ( SE ) measure the number of links coming into each page/ domain / Blog and each SE uses that information together with many other factors in some way to rank where you are listed in Search Engine Results .

Now that sounds quite easy the more blogs and websites you can get to link to you the better off you are BUT and this is a big BUT the other side of the equation is how many links you have going out from each page .

Lets look at this in a little detail I am going to take my wifes blog which she does just for fun because it is her hobby.

The Blog In Question is
Midwest Horse it is her blog where she talks about all things horsey and she has a popular group of readers who comment often on her blog anywhere between 5 and 25 comments for each post , I consider that a great achievement and a testimony to her writing style.

But and here is the but she very rarely gains visitors from Search Engines because apart from the name of her blog she ranks for nothing .

To my wife her blog is a great success she has made great friends with other Horse Bloggers and her blog gives her plenty of pleasure but I want to explain why even though her blog is popular with those that have found it she does not get Search Engine traffic .

I used a free tool called Xenu to Analise how many links she had going out from her home page and she has 227 links out from her home page of those 120 were to external websites and the rest were to internal pages or links from her blog. Because of the way blogs are designed that means she has 200 + links out from every page of her blog.

Now as I said earlier Search Engines measure how many links in to a page / site / blog and they also take into account how many links out so in my wifes case although her blog is popular with those who have found it Search Engines hate it and do not rate it for anything in their Search Results.

So what can you do to give your self a chance of being found in Search Engine results better.

DECREASE THE LINKS OUT

I played with this blog last night and this morning to see what could be achieved by tuning a blog and having less links out and ran Xenu over this blog and ended up with 42 links from home page of those 1/2 are to external links most to blogger itself and one 1 out to sitemeter which I set up to show how to use visitor traffic information to learn about visitors and to gain more traffic.

This Blog had 180 links out last night before I tuned it

So What Did I do on this blog to make it More Search Engine Friendly

1. Created Labels ( not to many ) so information was easy to find for specific type
2. Only Posted 1 Post on the home page ( settings can be set in Blogger )
3. Only included 5 popular posts and used my Labels as My Form of easy navigation for visitors
4. Made my archive information in to a drop down menu
5. Removed links to each public Google map and sent visitors to my Google Map Profile

Now I know I do not have a Blog Roll on here so if you have a blog roll it will increase your links out but there are ways to have a blog roll and still keep your links out to an acceptable level which I will try to explain in a later post

If you have any questions drop them in the comments and if you would like me to run Xenu drop me a comment with your blog details

steve