Author: Nancy McCord

Man there are a lot of bad blogs on the Web and then there are some really great ones. I have several sites that I routinely watch in my industry sector, I also watch our self-blogging client blogs, and our ghost blogging contractred blogs. All in all, you’ve just got to pick and chose what you follow.

I know that many people have started to blog solely for search engine benefits and that is okay by me, but when you blog for your business, the content just has to be good. With that in mind, here are my top tips to blog more effectively for search engines and for your business.

1. Provide interesting content that your readers would consider helpful.
2. Keep your posts regular and then stick with a schedule.
3. Mention keywords in your blog title and blog labels or categories.
4. Make your posts small no dissertations! Break larger posts into a series.
5. Be careful on your spacing. Make sure you look at your post after you publish it to confirm that the spacing is correct.
6. Don’t paste in your posts from Word. Sorry you need to move them to Wordpad or Notepad first and then into the blog control panel to remove formatting.
7. Keep the fonts, styles, and colors consistent on your blog from post to post.
8. Don’t use huge headlines and don’t use all capitals.
9. Watch the news in your business sector and blog early and hard on important news or tips.
10. If you can do a Google Sitemap for your blog posts so the search engines know about your content.

I hope these tips help you to be a more effective blogger. I use these same exact tips to train new bloggers, client bloggers, and to instruct people at seminars on how to blog. Remember blogging is fun, spontaneous, and conversational in nature but does have a few rules of best practice and etiquette.

I think not, however the world of blogs and SEO has definitely changed in a big way just this past several weeks.

It used to be that linking to your website by posting on other blogs in the blog comments was a great way to get quality inbound links. But not anymore! Blogger, WordPress and Typepad now automatically with no override control blog search engines from spidering links that you place in comments by including a no follow tag. Don’t confuse this with links in posts, it is just comments that are affected this way.

So what exactly does this mean, are blogs no longer great for SEO? No blogs are still great tools for SEO but the focus needs to change. Here are my top tips:

1. Don’t waste time posting comments on other blogs to get links back to your site or blog. This strategy no longer works.
2. Do blog on your own site. Use keyword dense posts and informational content to build the quality of your website and blog overall.
3. Do heavily link your blog into your website and vice versa.
4. Do include a site search engine on your website and use WordPress or Blogger custom FTP to allow your blog posts to be spidered as search result content for your website and blog.
5. If you use WordPress make sure to add the module that allows you to have a meta description, keywords, and social bookmarking tags.
6. Use social bookmarking tools to help push your site and encourage interaction and sharing. This may very well be the push that replaces commenting on other blogs and pointing back to your site and blog.
7. Do create relationships with other bloggers in your field to do cross linking IN POSTS not comments to your site. You both will benefit as long as you are not competitors. The creation of some of these strategic partnerships will allow you to have guest authors and a network of interlinked sites for better overall performance.

So is blogging for SEO dead? Not hardly, it has just changed significantly.