Making Your Blog SEO Friendly – Part 4

Last time we talked about Link Exchange programs and Blog Proliferation as tools for your workamping business. Before I continue with the next topics, let’s revisit those two briefly with a little expanded information.

I mentioned that cross exchanging links with other sites is not very effective, even when the other site is relevant to yours. You can make it a bit more effective if you can get the other sites to put your link somewhere besides a link directory page. The search engines, and especially Google, don’t seem to put much value in back links coming from a link directory page. Not that they don’t help at all, but they may not be worth the effort. The search engines grade a link on how hard it is to obtain and give you credit accordingly. Link directory pages are easy to get. One way links embedded in a legitimate page is much harder. Are you seeing the pattern now?

That’s why writing quality articles that will get picked up and used by other sites is so important. Whenever another relevant site “borrows” your article and puts it on their site it’s like they wrote about you on a page of their site. Your link is embedded in a page full of high quality content because you wrote it. Even better, it’s one way. You aren’t linking back. Are you seeing the pattern here as well? This, by the way, is one of the things that make blogging such a powerful weapon in your workamping arsenal. Because someone took the time to hand create the content of a blog post, the search engines value it highly.

The Magic Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is all the rage right now. Everyone is throwing that phrase around to describe everything from totally ugly sites to YouTube. Whenever a new innovation comes around, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and labels it Web 2.0, even when it isn’t. What is Web 2.0 anyway and how can it help us as workamping bloggers? We’ll spend another article, or maybe a whole series on Web 2.0 at another time. For now I just want to give you a quick overview of what you should be studying and using it for.

Web 2.0 basically describes the newer innovations in dynamic web sites. Web site technology, like everything else technological has gone through an evolution. Early web sites were little more than online letters consisting almost entirely of simple text on a page. Graphics really helped and are probably responsible for the first explosion of the web phenomenon. Web 2.0 is the term applied to the next big leap in that evolution. It mainly applies to interactive web sites – sites that incorporate interactive media like dynamic graphics, audio or video, customized or adaptive user experiences, etc.

This is important to us because the search engines recognize the popularity of these sites and rank them higher because of it. Sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc. can be useful in getting your site noticed by the search engines. They don’t do you much good as far as monetization goes, but that’s another article. For the purposes of this article, we like them because they can be used to link back to your site. MySpace, for example is ranked 9/10 by Google. So it is beneficial to get a MySpace page and add a link to your web site to it. The search engines will pick that up and credit you for it. Better yet, get all your friends to do the same. When many people on a social networking site like MySpace or FaceBook have these links to your site, your credit goes up. To that end, make videos and put them on YouTube, Google Video or Amazon as well. Then you can link back to them from your site and let YouTube provide the bandwidth. Also, you can enclose these videos or podcasts into your articles and make them more desirable. Producing these videos and uploading them is an entire article series in itself as well. Keep reading, we’ll cover all of this in more detail as fast as we can.

Get Socially Networked

One of the easiest ways to get your blog onto the social networking sites is to start your own accounts and link to your site from it. While I recommend you do this from several of the more popular sites, having others do it too is even better. You can make it easy for your readers to do this by including social networking quick links at the bottom of your posts. Fortunately, Wordpress makes this easy for us as well.

I use The Sociable plug-in from the Wordpress.org site and I prefer the Sociable Zyblog Edition. The easiest way to locate it is to do a Google search for Sociable Zyblog Edition. The Wordpress.org plug-in page should come up at or near #1 on Google for that key phrase. Download it, install it, activate it and configure it to include your favorite social networking sites. The instructions are good and the plug-in is easy to follow. Once that’s done your readers can easily click their favorite icon and share your site.