On Building Blog Traffic and SEO

BlogHer is nearly half over - my, how time flies. The morning was focused more on conceptual ideas rather than how tos and niche blogging. For example, women who have been blogging for several years talked about self-branding and self-promotion, building through online communities, and finding and following your passion.

Like the last couple of years, they also had a session on Naked Bloggers - but this year, pose the question - will 'naked' bloggers make history? An interesting twist on this session was the decision to have a historian moderate, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt from BlueBerry Productions in Boston.

Below Elise Bauer talks about tips to drive more traffic to your blog.

A few suggestions to newbies and even to bloggers who have been 'at it' for awhile. Despite the fact that there has been controversy over 'link love' over the past few years, Elise still says link, link, link and leave comments on other bloggers' sites.

Other grassroot suggestions include participating in blog events, contributing to communities that you care about and participating in social networks - UGGGGGH. (all 6,000 of them??)

As for site design, recommendations were pretty simple and centered around reduced image size, page length, avoiding a lot of clutter and colored backgrounds and ensuring that your font size and type is readable. Some people still don't include search bars in their blogs - bottom line, its a good idea.

Categories remain useful as well. Also if you're not already doing so, sign up for Google Analytics, Sitemeter or Statcounter so you can find out where your traffic is coming from. Syndication also came into play, i.e., tapping into the power of FeedBlitz and FeedBurner.

Great Resources:
http://www.alexa.com/site/devcorner/site_report
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
http://www.problogger.net
http://www.bloggersblog.com/blognetworklinks/
http://www.successful-blog.com
http://eMomsAtHome.com
http://bloggtd.pbwiki.com/ - for great blog workflow tools

BlogHer attendees look on and take notes.

On search engine optimization, Vanessa Fox from Google Google Webmaster Central gives us a few do's and don'ts. She walks us through meta description tags and other tips:

1. Use it to describe pages your way, not the search engine's way
2. Sell your site, but don't mislead
3. Incorporate the page's target term
4. 200-250 characters in length, but more is okay
5. Make sure each page has a unique meta description tag
6. Use your blogging software to use the first paragraph or RSS snipped of your blog entry

Someone in the audience asks about cross-posting. Says Vanessa, "the search engine only wants to index and show one version of the page and they only want to show one. It won't hurt you. But if you have a preference on which version of your post that you want, try to block another version with robots and have them point directly to you so your original post becomes the authorative one."