Image via WikipediaOnce you get started blogging and establish an editorial calendar one of the next things you’ll want to tackle is how to optimize your posts for search engines. While there are a lot of theories about this, I found the advice from this post to be the most useful.
In a nutshell, write descriptive headlines, summarize the post in the lead and don’t split your post into pieces.
Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow explains these techniques in this video with journalist/blogger Thomas Crampton. His first point is to write your headlines like a wire service editor being as descriptive as possible so readers know what they will get when they click on the link. The likely result will be more new readers discovering your blog on search engines and the opportunity to build good will with readers.
Doctorow continues that the lead should include a summary of your post which will allow the reader to choose if this post is worth reading or skipping. If you look at the lead of this post you’ll see this in action and you’ve come this far into the post for the details. Lifehacker has some similar thoughts on this subject here which reminds me to mention that relevant external links are also good ways to support your main points.
Finally, make it as simple as possible for the reader to consume your content without clicking for more information. While shortening what is displayed with a more tag might be advised for very long posts, don’t use it on something shorter just to get another page view for ads you might have on your blog. You should also publish full text in your RSS feed and not force readers to visit your blog to read the rest of the post. These things tend to annoy readers and does not build the trust required for readers to subscribe to your blog.
For more information, check out the post here which includes the YouTube video.
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