Promoting a Blog on the Search Engines

If you're writing a blog on a regular basis, then you're well on your way to enjoying a respectable position on the search engines. However, in order to get the most traffic you can from your blog, you should take some time to make sure your blog is set up in such a way to make it easy for the search engines to find your entries as they "spider" (crawl) your web site. Also, you'll need to make sure that if they do find your content, that they index it in such a way as to help your users find you. If you're going to be spending hundreds of hours in front of a keyboard promoting your business, you might as well spend a few hours up front making those hours count. Someone accused Abe Lincoln of saying "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax". When it comes to blogging and search engine optimization, we think one hour in a hundred is more realistic -- especially if you spend those hours up front.

This is time well spent, whether you're writing a real estate blog or any other kind of business blog. I'll be focusing on real estate in the examples that follow, but the basic principles apply to any kind of Blog that you'd like to promote in the search engines.

Let's Get On the Same Page(s)

Your first step is to start thinking about your blog not as a catalog of your moods or a monument to your accomplishments, but a set of pages, with links to other pages (both inside your blog, to your web site, and outside your blog). Then, while still making your blog interesting to your readers, you want to make the pages friendly to the search engines. Thinking about your blog as a set of pages and links is a good way to begin, since after all, that's the way the search engine "thinks" about it.

From a search engine perspective, the most important pages on your blog include your blog's home page and your individual post pages. And -- as we'll discuss in the next tip -- the most important links are those the search engine will follow and that will give the engine a hint about how to index the target page.

Though your home page and individual entry page are the most important pages in your search engine marketing plans, your category pages and your archive pages also have a small but substantial role to play. Each category page title is potentially another good keyword phrase, and both category and archive pages help your blog entries stay available to be spidered long after you've moved on to many new posts.
Make Sure Your Post Pages Have Static URLs linking to them
Put simply, a static URL is a URL without a question mark in it, in contrast to a dynamic URL, which does have a question mark. For example, here are two links that point to the same place:
- Dynamic: http://www.particlewave.com/?p=82
- Static: http://www.particlewave.com/2005/using-directories-to-promote-your-blog_82.html
When you navigate to a post by clicking on a post's "permalink" link or the post's title (depending on how your blog is set up) , you want to see a static URL in the address bar of your browser. You want the static version not only because the search engine is more likely to follow a static link and index the page, but also because the static link repeats the title of your post again, and this helps it show up for the keywords you want.

The good news is, if you're using Blogger or Typepad, you probably have static links already set up by default. On Wordpress you'll need to check out the Wordpress help (Codex) for "permalinks" and follow the instructions there.
Watch Your Titles
From a search engine perspective, the most important tag on your page is the title tag. The title of a page is what shows up in the blue bar at the top of your web browser window. My experience shows that your blog should be set up this way:
- Your blog's home page should show your Blog's Title, e.g. "Mytown Real Estate". Your blog's title should have the keywords a potential client would search for right up front. You want "Springfield Real Estate" (or maybe "Springfield Homes for Sale" or the like). Not "Edgewood P. Tuttle's Amazing Guide to the Sprocket City of Springfield".
- Each post page should have as a page title the title you entered for that post, and nothing else, e.g., "New Listing in Oak Park". It should not be "My Real Estate Blog : New Listing In Oak Park". If you have any control over your blog's appearance, avoid repeating the blog's title in your post title.
- Category pages should show the category title, e.g. "Market Updates" or "Springfield Real Estate Listings".
As you write your blog, try to write titles that match what you would search for if you were searching for real estate in your area. If you need help thinking about how people search, two great resources are Overture's Keyword Suggestion Tool and WordTracker.com.

A common formula that I use is town name plus something. "New York Condos", "Turtle Bay Real Estate Market", etc. Don't be boring about it, don't hackney the same locations, and do match your titles to your posts. If you happen to be writing a light-hearted aside about marsupials, don't title your post "Springfield Real Estate" just because that's what you hope to be selling that day.
Learn About Other Tags
There are other tags besides the title tag that are important to your search results, the main one being the description meta tag. Getting into some of these is beyond the scope of this article, but as an aside I do have code for getting the title tag and description tag "right" (according to me) for Wordpress if you're interested. All of other tags put together probably don't equal the title tag in importance, however, so glossing over them here is all to the good.
Integrate Your Blog and Your Website
If you already have a real estate web site, I believe your blog should be integrated with your existing site as much as possible. That's where your listings and your lead generating forms are, or at least, I hope that's where your listings and your lead generating forms are. You want your visitors to go there, and you want the search engines to pick up the "internal links" to these pages as well. The best case is if your blog software runs on the same server and can use the same navigation elements, etc. Failing that, you may find a service that can match your web site's look and feel and host your blog externally. (If you can't find such a service, let me know, perhaps I'll start one).

If you can't run blog software on your server and you don't have much control over how your blog is configured, there are still some things you should be doing in your blog. First, make sure every page of your site has a link back to your web site (an easy way to do this is through your blog roll). Second, if your site has been updated in any way, blog it! Did you take a new listing and is that listing on your site? There's a great blog entry for you.
Don't Overdo It
Though you should have the search engines in mind as "one of" your readers, you shouldn't write exclusively for the search engines. If you have something interesting to say with no redeeming search value, go ahead and say it! And even in those posts where you are going after search appeal in both your title and content, you still need to write with a human visitor in mind. Keyword spamming will defeat the purpose on two levels -- your human visitors are sure to surf away, and the search engines may penalize your content anyway.

Although the search engine optimization community sometimes gets into a good-natured debate over the relative benefits of incoming links versus on-page content, the great thing about a blogging regularly is that you're going to be getting both as time goes along if your content is worth reading. Put in a little time up front, and write naturally and consistently, and you may see tangible benefits in as little as a few weeks.