Optimising your Blog for Search Engines
There are several ways to drive visitor traffic into your Web log (blog), especially when you are catering to a niche topic. One method is to optimise your blog for search engine websites, where people go first when they are searching for something. Thus, it is just practical to perform Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques.
When you write your articles with SEO in mind, consider your human visitors and the search engine bots, which crawl into your website so that you will be indexed into the search results. Writing quality content for human readers is not enough to bring you to top search engine ranks. Similarly, when you write with only the bots in consideration, you will sacrifice loyal readers and quality content.
SEO techniques are typically divided into two parts: offsite SEO or techniques performed outside the website, and onsite SEO or techniques done within the site.
Offsite SEO activities are generally outside your (as the blog owner or blogger) control. Such activities include having other websites provide a link to your blog. To maximise the SEO capabilities of these links, also called inbound links, they must be from websites that have higher search engine ranking as yours. Also, their topic and keywords used must be relevant to your blog.
On the other hand, onsite SEO comprises a wide range of activities from writing quality content, laying out themed pages, designing clean and easy-to-navigate website, and maximising internal as well as outbound links. Moreover, regularly updating your website, choosing the appropriate domain name and avoiding duplicate contents, among others, are also important.
As a final note, when your blog ranks well in search engines, do not stop the SEO techniques because when no efforts are done to your site over time, your rank could go down.