SEO Tips for Blogs Part II

In part I of this two part series on SEO tips for Blogs we looked at WordPress plugins, creating themes, internal linking, RSS Feeds and Blog Aggregators. In the second part of  search engine optimisation for blogs, we examine social media, external linking and how to avoid duplicate content.

Social Media

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking site that allows you keep in touch with groups of people on the web through the passing of short messages (tweets) to say what you are doing. It sound like a ridiculous idea but it has the capability to build up a targeted audience for your blog posts. Use Twitter to build up a network of contacts in your subject and automatically notify them. The TwitterTools plug-in can also notify your followers to  your latest posts as it is published. Good for building a readership

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social networking site where users recommend web pages according to interests. A toolbar is created in your browser and as you surf the internet you can flag sites as being interesting to other by clicking on ‘I like it’ giving it the thumbs up. (Or conversely, give it the heave-ho with a thumbs down.)

Bored people often click on the stumble upon toolbar to find some interesting content and it brings a random web page from the community of StumbleUpon finds. StumbleUpon tends to produce untargetted spikes in traffic but it can help to get your message across.

Niche Groups

Sites such as Sphinn, Digg. It is important with these sites to know your market and post only in those places which share similar interests as the material covered in your blog.

Facebook Groups

Potential to create targeted traffic by marketing to people that share your interests. Allows you to send messages to a range of people. If you have something to sell, it is not going to generate much in the way of ROI.

Social Bookmarks

Adding social book marks to your post will give your readers to flag interesting posts and refer friends. There are numberous WordPress plugins that will accomplish this. Share this is my personal favourite because it does not clutter the post with icons but covers a good range of bookmarking services.

External Links

To get things started you can submitted your site to a number of free directories.There are lists of free directories such as DirectoryCritic which allows you to sort directories by PageRank. Look out for specialist niche directories are relevant to your blog’s content.

When submitting to directories look at the other sites in the category that you intend to submit to and check them for quality. Choose directories with  good PR and if possible choose a category which has as few entries as possible. This will give your blog the greatest transfer of PR. Use a variety of  keywords in your link anchor text to avoid making them look unnatural.

Avoiding Duplicate Content

Duplicate content on blogs occurs because there are many ways to arrive at the same page. Typically, a blog will allow you access the same page  by category, tag, date and archive. Restricting URLs to be spidered to the permalink URLs of the blog post and restricting access to other forms can be achieved with the robots.txt. We covered this in a previous post on duplicate content. The All in One SEO Pack also adds no-follow attributes to these also.