Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - The Complete ProBlogger Guide to SEO

While browsing blogs on the internet, I ran across this excellent column about a subject that up until recently I knew little about and was trying to find out more about the subject of SEO. Darren makes a good living at it. He explains it well. We should all learn from it... Unfortunately it is rather long so I am only showing the intro and first few paragraphs...you will have to go to his website to read the column in its entirety. By the way, this column was at the top of Googles Search Engine...George Marshall

Darren Rowse is the guy behind ProBlogger. You can read a little more about his journey of blogging on the About ProBlogger page -

He is a 34 year old Australian living in Melbourne, and lives in a wonderful inner suburban part of the city. A full time blogger making a living from the medium now for well over a year.

He's been blogging since November 2002 on a number of sites, starting out with just one at Livingroom - a site about Spirituality, Pop Culture, Life in Australia and miscellaneous topics that take my fancy from time to time.

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - The Complete ProBlogger Guide to SEO The following is a compiled version of my recent Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs series (part of the 31 Days to building a better blog project) It has been edited slightly for the purposes of keeping it flowing as one article, Written on August 15, 2005 by Darren Rowse

Search Engine Optimization is something that makes many blogger’s heads spin - I know this because every time I write an SEO article I get comments from bloggers telling me that its too big a topic and that they’d rather just write ‘quality content’.

Whilst I’ll never argue that quality content should be anything but a first priority in blogging, the fact is that there are many millions of pages of great writing languishing around at the bottom of search engines results pages that deserve to be read by many but which rarely see the light of day because their authors have failed to understand that just a few simple tweaks in the writing process could see them ranking considerably higher.

So it’s time for another series

People often ask me ‘how do I get ranked number one in (((insert favourite search engine here)))?

My answer usually starts with - ‘I don’t really know what I’m talking about….but….’

You see whilst some of my blogs rank very highly on different search engines - I often don’t really know why. Much of what I do is educated guessing and experimentation. I do read a lot of other people’s advice on the topic, but the more I read the more I realize that I’m not alone in my guess work - virtually every article I read is a ‘best guess’ of some kind.

My main advice to people wanting to optimize their blogs for Search Engines is to keep it simple. Start with quality content on a specific topic and then tweak it using the best current advice going around.

Before I start I want to encourage bloggers not to be overwhelmed by Search Engine Optimization. Whilst it can seem complicated and can become something of an obsession for blog owners you should know that blogs have many of the things I’m going to write about built into them and are more often than not quite well set up for SEO. What follows is intended as a primer or a background briefing on some of the issues we should be aware of - don’t fall into the temptation of becoming an SEO addict - rather file it away and allow it to naturally impact the way you blog.

The remainder of the column and more about Darren Rowse can be found at:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/08/15/search-engine-optimization-for-blogs/