Surely you have read many articles on search engine optimization for websites and portals. How about your own blog? Can you apply conventional SEO techniques to your blog? The answer is “Yes”, you can.

Blog has become more and more popular these days due to its flexibility and easy content management. Blogs and blog posts are generally search engine friendly because they are rich in text, links, and unique information. And generally, blogs are known to search engines as daily snippets of information that are updated regularly, which is why they rank high in search results.

So how can you best optimize your blog?

Well, optimizing a blog is similar to optimizing a website. But depending on the blog service you use, eg Blogspot, WordPress, typepad; the result and effectiveness may look somewhat different.

Below are some of the main pending tasks:

1. When setting up your blog, make sure your main keyword is in the blog domain. No matter what blog service you are using, this one is a MUST.

For example, if you want search engines to find you for the keyword “Celebrity”, make sure it is within your domain/subdomain.

2. Try to focus on your topic and the topic of your blog. If your blog is tech oriented, then only focus on tech related topics. Mixing content doesn’t really help in SEO. The advantage of a blog comes from the frequency of publication. If search engines find similarities in a pattern of 3-4 posts per day, they will be very active in crawling that site. Depending on the topic of the blog, you may be able to boost your blog in the rankings if it is related to a hot topic on the web.

3. Always use interesting titles on your blog, sometimes known as ‘link baiting’. Your title should create an interest in the reader’s mind to read more about your topic.

4. Use tags to highlight and emphasize certain keywords.

5. Link to other popular related blogs and ask them to link to yours.

6. If you are using wordpress, make sure you take full advantage of permalinks. Use a good structure with the title of your post in the link.

7. Use Google Sitemaps, which is a feature provided by Google for webmasters. Google sitemap will help you to get your blog indexed well in Google.

8. There is no better food for search engines than new content and links. So update often and let everyone know by “pinging” all famous aggregators.

There are many other ways to optimize your blog for search engines. But whatever you do, make sure you keep your current domain and service or blog system as long as you keep writing. You could end up losing a lot of readers if you move elsewhere.