For many businesses, having a blog is an integral part of their marketing strategies. Blog SEO is similar to website SEO where the aim is to get to the top of the search engine results pages.

To achieve this, a company that specializes in blog SEO can provide services that will further the commercial goals of your business. This achieved in a number of ways.

Metrics and statistics are a cornerstone in blog SEO, however, the most important metric of all, and the most honest, is your bottom line. Are you achieving your targets?

The only way to achieve targets is by selling and before any sale can be made, or a lead generated, or for that matter, an inquiry received; your website must be found. Building a web site and maintaining it will not generate any traffic unless you undertake some website or blog SEO programs.

Blog SEO is not simply a matter of submitting your web site to search engines. Sure, you can build the most perfect web site in the world, but they will not come unless your web site ranks for the terms your customers are typing into search engines.

The link between your blog or website, the search engines and the millions of internet users is the blog SEO specialist. Their role is to have your business promoted to a position within the search pages where potential customers can find you.

In simple terms, blog SEO oils the wheels of commerce by bringing potential customer who have already shown interest in a products or services such as yours to your blog or website.

Why do we go to great lengths to undertake blog SEO programs? That sounds like a silly question. We all know that the only way to get a decent placement in the search engine results is by telling the search engine all about us.

So what exactly are you telling the search engines about your blog and what should you be telling them? The term keyword is bandied about alot and yet it is only a descriptor. Search engines want to know more than just a list of keywords. The want to know all about your blog - and that is where blog SEO comes in.

Do you need to tell the search engines what each post (page) is about? No. Search engines are not human, they cannot think or understand meanings. In fact, search engines are only interested in words. They are becoming smarter when it comes to deciphering un-natural word groupings, but they cannot put a word into a picture as a human does.

Search engines are really only focused on word matching. I enter a search term and the search engine goes through its data base trying to find entries that match that word or group of words. The search engine then delivers those results as a list based on the rankings for each page found. Blog SEO is all about (a) telling them that your page exist and (b) getting your page the highest ranking possible.

The word matching process is labeled ‘keyword’. In simple terms, a user enters a search word - called a keyword - and the matching process begins. If your blog SEO has been successful using that keyword then you may well find yourself with a high ranking for that page.

Why undertake blog SEO. To get ranked by the search engines so that internet users can find your pages and come and visit. If no one knows you exist, no one will come. Very simple philosophy, however, blog SEO is darned hard work.

One prime area that can influence your blog SEO is in your comments. This area is often forgotten when it comes to boosting the number of keywords on your page.

The comments sections provides many benefits for blog owners. Its primary function is to provide a communication pathway for your visitors. This communication pathway is two way. Your visitors can leave comments, make observations, leave hints and ask questions. However, I wonder how many blog owners respond to these comments and respond in a manner that boosts their blog SEO.

If you do respond to your comments, do you do so using keywords associated to the page. So long as you do carefully and you don’t look like you are spamming your own comments, dropping the occasional keyword into your comments may make good blog SEO sense.

It must be remembered that comments contain indexable data so why not use them to increase the keyword use in your blog SEO program.

Blog metrics is an inexact science at the best of times. You can however give your Blog SEO strategies a real boost if you know how to read the Google Goldmine (aka Google Analytics) - the deeper you dig - the more gold you may find buried.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of information and sometimes it can be fairly daunting to try and wade through it all. However if you can try to learn how to use it, one section at a time, you will the information is not only useful, but information you can act on.

If you look at the visitors section as an example. Google Analytics provides a nice graphical representation of how your visitors arrived on your site. Where they referred, did they come from a search engine or did they come directly? Dig a little deeper and you can get a breakdown of those statistics.

For example, you can see which sites have referred traffic to your site and in what numbers. You can also see which search engines are referring traffic to you. Dig a little deeper again and you will see what search terms the visitors are using to find your site. Now you are starting to get to the meat.

By identifying which search terms are being used, you can gain a greater understanding of where you need to concentrate your keywords optimization. If you are using a list of a dozen or so keywords yet only getting hits from half that list, perhaps it time to review your keyword strategies. Are the keywords still relevant? Do you need to concentrate on some keywords a little more?

Most blog metrics packages allow you to look at these statistics. With a little thought you can turn this raw data into valuable information that will enable you to fine tune your blog SEO strategies. Tweak a keyword here, remove another keyword and replace it with a longtail that is more appropriate; suddenly your targeted traffic starts to increase.

As your traffic grows from search engine referrals you will be able to refine your strategies even further. Blog metrics are often ignored or only looked at with a passing interest. If you spend a little a time, you find they are little gold mines, the further you dig, the more valuable the information can become.

How often do you need to submit your blog to the search engines as part of your blogs SEO strategies? Good question but a very short answer. In reality - once - when you first establish the blog.

Search engines are pretty good at finding information for themselves - they don’t need constant reminders. If you do want to remind them, just submitting your sitemap as a part of a blog SEO strategy is enough to have them come back and visit.

You are better off ensuring that when the spiders do come a trolling, everything is ready for them. Some components are very important and using a spider simulator as part of your blog SEO routine can be a good idea. Spider simulators let you see what the spider sees. This is particularly helpful for identifying broken or super slow pages. These pages may prevent your page from being spidered successfully.

Other on page areas to look at include:

• Meta tags: page title, description and keywords
• Page headings and content
• Keyword use which matches your meta tags for keywords
• Internal links
• External links (that you have some control over)
• Alt and title tags for videos and images

Submitting your site a million times will not improve your rankings and as a part of blog SEO activities is a waste of your valuable time. Spend time optimizing the above points and leave the spidering to the search engines.

Your blog can be likened to a book. A nice cover, perhaps a short bio about the author (you do have an About page don’t you?), and either interesting lead in articles or short excerpts. You work hard, you have the right keywords, you have great content and you are getting traffic through the search engines. Great! Everything is working fine - or is it?

Getting your blog SEO right is only the first step. Good SEO strategies will see you listed on the front page of the search engines and will start to generate traffic. What happens when that traffic arrives on your blog?

I have come across many articles through search engines or social sites, articles that have been good enough to attract me to their site. The problem I have found is that I cannot go any further. Comments are hidden with the link not obvious - often a fancy graphic that blends well with the site - but doesn’t flag itself as a comment link.

Some sites have the ‘Home’ link hidden. Once I have read an article I often like to visit the home page to see what the latest article is - no link - or at least - no obvious link. Like most internet surfers, I don’t have time to hunt around to find these links so I leave the site and move on.

These sites have done everything possible to get me there. Their use of keywords has obviously been good, their blog SEO practices have been spot on - their site has let them down. As bloggers we have to avoid the blinker approach, an approach where you focus all your attention on one aspect of your blog which ends up being detrimental to the overall affect.

Blog SEO is important, so to is content. Your sites design and user friendliness is also just as important. Once you have attracted your visitor you want to keep them for as long as possible before finally moving on - preferably through a convenient link. Don’t stop just at keyword optimization - work on your whole blog.

Interesting question.  Do you concentrate on the various blog directories or do you concentrate on blog SEO? The real answer is most likely, ‘both’.

If you are wondering where you should concentrate your efforts then I suggest you forget the terminology for now. The real question becomes, do you concentrate on people (blog directories) or search engines and their spiders (blog SEO).

If you are looking to concentrate on people then your blog needs to reflect that. The content needs to be written in a user friendly manner. If your main focus is search engine rankings, your content needs to be keyword rich. Whilst you can write friendly keyword rich articles, it can become very taxing trying to produce it on a daily basis.

I hate to sound like I am sitting on the fence, however in this case I going to have to suffer a few splinters. I don’t see why you cannot do both, but in a less taxing manner. Write your articles in a user friendly manner; make sure there are an adequate supply of keywords within the articles. Whenever possible, write a full keyword rich article.

The user friendly articles, whilst still containing keywords, are going to keep your readers coming back. If you have the occasional keyword rich but slightly reader unfriendly, your reader are not going to be to troubled. It is the overall image that is going to be important.

What is your preference and does your blog reflect it. Writing for the masses enables you to use the various blog directories to their fullest. Writing for search engine spiders may not attract the masses but it will place you highly on the results pages for the various search engines. Write for both, and you will have one of those special blogs that attracts thousands of visitors each and every day.

It should be. Blog SEO should be a part of your everyday blogging. It’s strange as just about everyone knows what is involved with good blog SEO practices, or at least some of the minimum requirements. So why don’t they do it? I am not going to go through what is good blog SEO practices, we have many articles on the topic already. I want to look at your blogging habits  - or rather, I want you to look at your blogging habits.

Laziness? I think not. I think the problem is more a joint case of lack of motivation and poor habits. For many people, when they first start blogging, blog SEO is the last thing on their mind. So they blog away. Often ad-hoc, often off topic - if they have a specific genre that is, and generally with very poor blog SEO practices.

It becomes a habit - a poor blog SEO habit

Habits can be broken. They say it takes a week to form a habit and four weeks to break it. If you have fallen into the habit of not looking at the requirements for good blog SEO, then spend the next four weeks religiously following them. At the end of the four weeks you will find that you have now formed a new blogging habit - hopefully one that is good for your blog’s SEO.

There are many blog and website services provider in the market place now. What features do you look for before buying their services.

The first and most important feature to look for is the level of expertise in the services they offer. Some services providers claim a high level expertise but unless they can back these claims up with evidence, generally in the form of a portfolio of successful clients, then tread warily.

The second feature, whilst not truly a feature, is price. Cheap is not always best, in fact it rarely is. The lower the price the lower the level of service - it is a simple matter of economics. If your are offering a service that requires a high level of expertise from a team then low fees indicate either a small team or a lack of dedicated resources.

The major features to consider are of course the services themselves. Do they offer web hosting? Price again is important here - cheap hosting invariably leads to cheap service - frequent down times and little support. When it comes to web hosting, you get what you pay for.

Other features include web design, content writing, directory and search engine submission, SEO, blog and/or website marketing and  an ongoing help program.

Providers such as Brick Marketing not only offer a comprehensive range of blog and website services, they have the expertise to see your project through from start to finish. Brick Marketing also have a wide range of blog and website services to assist you in the ongoing development of your blog or website.

How much time and effort do you put into your blog SEO? Have you hired a professional to do the job for you? Either way, the following checklist will help to determine if the right areas are being targeted. If you haven’t commenced blog SEO activities then this checklist will help you get started.

1. Blog SEO Strategy: Have your blog carefully evaluated to identify the areas that require optimization; then put together a strategy to achieve that optimization.
2. Keyword Research: The evaluation of your blog should help to identify ideal keywords. Further research will identify what steps are needed to fully optimize those keywords to complete the blog SEO.
3. Optimizing Meta Tags: Blog SEO should also include writing effective Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions based on your keyword and blog evaluation.
4. Content: Create content that is not only rich in keywords but also relevant to your blog, engages the reader and provides enough attraction to bring the reader back for more. This is an ongoing component to a successful blog SEO strategy.
5. Link Building Strategy: Develop a link building strategy that targets your keywords and focuses on linking to content rather than just the main page.

Blog SEO is not as easy as it sounds. It takes time and careful analysis, something that perhaps should be left to the professionals in the field. If you do decide to do it yourself, take care that your blog SEO activities do not focus too much on one area to the detriment of the others. A balanced well thought out strategy is the only way to successfully complete a blog SEO campaign.

Many will argue that graphics and images do little to help blog SEO and blog marketing. This is debatable and will depend on how much emphasis you place on pure keyword usage and content optimization. If you believe as I do that traffic and external linking play a greater role in your blog SEO strategies then you may agree with the use of graphics and images after reading this article.

How will graphics or images help my blog SEO?

Graphics or images on their own will not help. It is how you use them and where you get them from that counts. To get the most from using graphics or images you need to visit sites such as flickr.com where there are millions of images, photos and videos on display. A site such as flickr.com has Page Rank which can be passed on to your site, in particular your post’s page. You just need to find the right photo or image and place it by direct link to the source.

Is it that simple - where is the blog SEO value?

No it is not that simple. You need several other factors to work for you. You can use a site such as flickr.com to store all your own photos or images. If you want to use someone else’s photos or images then you need to request their permission. This is where you get the PR value. Leave a comment on the photo owner’s photo requesting permission to use that photo. You can do this even if you host your own images. Search engines do not know who owns the images. A request like this obviously requires a link so that the photo owner can view the site prior to giving permission. That link in the comments is one link with Page Rank back to your blog.

Once permission has been granted, publish your post with the photo or graphic. Go back and leave a comment thanking them and pointing to the post itself so that the photo owner can see the photo in situ.Very few photo owners remove these comments as you have been very polite in requesting permission and included proper referencing in the post - it is free advertising for them. You now have two links, one to the home page from the request and one to the post itself - both carrying PR value.

All that is left is to ensure that the image and alt tags have been correctly formatted using keywords and you have a graphic or image that is going to provide some extra value to your blog SEO. Not only that, you have improved the overall appeal of your posts.

A bouncing blog - sounds interesting. When it comes it blog SEO, you do not want a bouncing blog. What is bouncing. The bounce rate is a measurement of how many visitors land on your home page and then leave without visiting any other pages. Together with the time measurement, you can get a fairly good overall picture of your blog.

If you have a bounce rate of 70% with an average stay of 1.20 minutes; you know you are getting visitors, but they are not staying and certainly not staying long enough to read the landing page. There can be many reasons for this. Perhaps you have engaged in a pay per click campaign. People are clicking to visit but not staying. Perhaps your blog marketing is wrong with visitors arriving only to find you don’t have what they are looking for. This is a problem. It means your blog marketing campaign is not delivering.

If you do have a high bounce rate, you need to adjust your landing page to see what works; to see which modifications keep the visitors on your page and then deliver them to other pages.

Good solid blog SEO strategies along with constant analysis of your traffic should keep your blog from bouncing.

Blog SEO, is it really that important? After all, its just a blog. With that mindset perhaps blog SEO is not that important. Blog marketing and blog design are probably not that important either. On the other hand, if you are serious about your blog; serious about getting visitors; delivering a message or making money; then blog SEO is extremely important.

Around 85% of online consumers use a search engine of some type. If you don’t use good search engine optimization practices then your competitors are receiving the traffic and your left behind. Given the billions of searches that are made each day it is important to get onto that first page for your given keyword.  The majority of consumers only go as far as that first page. Some look at the second page. Very few get to page three.

Employing a professional blog SEO  consultant is often money well spent. If they can get you onto the first page then the flow of visitors will more than adequately cover that initial expense. If they incorporate blog design and blog marketing in the package then your visitor numbers will rise dramatically. If you have a good product to sell, affiliate program or other income generating program that is attractive to your visitor then you may well be able to employ the consultant on an ongoing basis. Blog SEO - here at Blog Marketing Journal, we consider it very important.

Where does your blog SEO focus sit - concentrated heavily on Google, or spread to cover all major search engines. The announcement that Microsoft have made a huge offer for Yahoo may leave some looking at their current strategies. The question that must be asked first is what changes can Microsoft bring to Yahoo?

The announcement stated that the focus would be on consumers, advertisers and publishers and not so much on technologies. The immediate question in my mind is the Google-Firefox relationship and whether or not Microsoft will align Yahoo more with Internet Explorer.

It seems that Microsoft and Yahoo have been in discussion for almost 18 months with the Yahoo board obviously interested in the proposal. With that in mind it will be interesting to see if Yahoo starts to implement any Microsoft ideas prior to the takeover. Of course Yahoo have to agree to the proposal first and I am sure there are many government agencies that will run their magnifying glasses over the proposal. For now, watch for any changes to Yahoo’s requirements.

Irrespective of the outcome, your blog SEO strategies should target all search engines. Not only should you target all search engines, you should be constantly watching what the search engines are doing. Determine what blog SEO strategies you need to tweak to keep pace with search engine changes and what directions they are taking into the future.

If this all appears too difficult or too complicated then look at some of the blog and website services that specialize in blog SEO strategies and blog marketing - the dollars invested could turn out to be dollars saved.

Your old posts are a blog SEO goldmine if you know how to use them. These five tips will certainly make the most use of those old posts.

Tip 1: Whenever it is appropriate link a keyword back to an old post. This post relates to Blog SEO so I can effectively link to any of the older posts that relate to that topic. I am able to create three internal links just through this post.

Tip 2: I mentioned in a previous post that a lot of blogs waste their 404 Page Not Found error. Use the page to list your top posts.

Tip 3: Write a series of posts on related topics. This not only provides the opportunity to link each page, it has the added bonus of bringing your readers back.

Tip 4: Create static info pages that you can link to on a regular basis. Don’t forget to link to your About page when appropriate.

Tip 5: Make sure your sitemap is always up to date for search engines. Create a static site map for your visitors as well. While time consuming you can list every page which becomes another internal link.

Never underestimate the value of internal links. Whilst not as powerful as inbound links, internal links increase the value of the pages linked - a quick and easy blog SEO tactic.