SEO and Marketing Your Blog

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By pasting your tag code here, each time you post a message to your blog the search engines also get a copy of all of your tagged keywords added on to the bottom of it. Even if for some reason your blog post doesn’t mention your keywords the tags will! This means that if you have a blog on Christmas but you choose to talk about your family pets in your post, the indexers will still get Christmas as one of your keywords, because they get it from the tags.

Ping

The search engines send their spider, or bot, to your site on a regular basis. They schedule their visits based on the size of your website and how often it appears to be updated. However, if you want to send a message to them letting them know you have updated your site, then you can do something called “pinging.” Pinging, in this context, is simply sending a code string to the search engines which says “hey come look at my site again, it’s updated, and I want it indexed again.”

All you have to do to ping the search engines is to go to a ping website, enter the URL of your blog, check the boxes of where you want to ping (generally do all of them) and then click “Ping.” It really is that simple and quick. The two most popular ping websites are www.ping-o-matic.com and www.pingoat.com.

It is generally advisable that you ping each time you update your blog, or each week at least. This makes sure your site is getting seen by the search engines and that it is being indexed as fast as possible.

SEO and Marketing Your Blog

Search engine optimization is a very important part of making your blog successful. It’s important to understand how the search engines see your information and what they do with it. By understanding how they work you are better able to create your blog as a “search engine friendly” site. The easier the search engine can work with your site, then the better rankings you will receive from them.

While search engine optimization is important, you cannot rely solely on natural visitors to your website from the search engines. It is great to have some of your readers come from there, but you will generally want your blog’s name to get out there in other ways as well. You will want to do all of the other things suggested to help drive traffic to your website. The search engines, even if you get a great ranking, will not do it all for you! You need to market your site and market it to your target audience.