Top 10 SEO Tips for Bloggers

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1. I always recommend using an off-the-shelf blog program rather than joining a blog network like blogger.com. This is because off-the-shelf software tends to provide increased flexibility in regards to SEO and the many SEO plug-ins available for installation.
2. Always come up with a few relevant, targeted keywords and use them once or twice in your post.
3. The subject or title of your post is the most important place to put a keyword, so keep that in mind and use keywords in your titles.
4. Never copy anyone's post or news from other sites and post word-by-word. This will create duplicate content issues. Rather, if you are going to post a news story, write it from scratch. Try to give credit to the source to be nice; however, this may work in negative fashion for you because you now gave a free link to another story which may end up ranking better than yours. However, you also need to comply with copyright issues and most news organizations have rights to their news and may require you to give them credit. One possible solution would be to give credit to the source and link to their main page rather than the article itself.
5. Stay on topic with your blog and write informative content. Don't try to cover too many unrelated subjects in one blog as this might confuse a search engine which is trying to figure out what your blog is about and its category.
6. Post on a regular basis. Fresh content may outrank older content. In addition, Google also has a Blog Search Engine and there are many other blog search engines out there which give preference to new content.
7. Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon to bookmark your posts. You may get additional traffic and links from the coverage.
8. Install social bookmarking plug-ins in your blog so your visitors can also bookmark your posts. AddThis.com offers such a plug-in.
9. Announce your new blog posts on your social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The more coverage you get means the more traffic and links you may get. You can even automate some of this. You could autotweet your blog posts with a tool such as twitterfeed.com. You can also autopost your blog posts in LinkedIn and Facebook with their applications.
10. Build as many links to your blog as possible. If your blog has many links and ranks well, almost any content you post will also rank well. Some ideas would be to trade links with similar blogs from their blog roll or trade blog posts with other bloggers. Guest blogging is also a great idea. Many bloggers will allow you to provide them free content and in return you get a free link from the post.

By Pierre Zarokian, President and CEO, Submit Express