*(SEO: Search Engine Optimization)

Secciones

• Antecedentes
• ¿Qué sabe Google sobre tu blog?
• Por qué la optimización para la búsqueda de blogs es distinta que la de webs
• Registro de dominios y hospedaje
• Búsqueda de palabras clave (keywords)
• Tener lo mismo que el resto de la gente
• Escribir títulos claros e impactantes
• Optimizando la estructura de la web
• Análisis estadísticos de la web
• Controversia
• Usa push marketing para lanzar tu web
• Entender el funcionamiento del networking (contactos con otros)
• Saber más sobre SEO

Antecedentes

Mientras que necesitamos más de 300 páginas para hablar de la SEO, solo una docena son suficientes para tratar el SEO para un blog. Por qué? Según van mejorando los buscadores, Google y otros recolectan más información, lo que les permite recomendar y calificar (rank) los blogs basándose en la confianza que la gente da a esos blogs.

¿Qué sabe Google de tu blog?

¿Qué tiene Google?

Los buscadores tienen un montón de medidas de la confianza para los blogs. Google sabe mucho más sobre tu blog de lo que puedes pensar. Párate a pensar que Google tiene….

• el buscador numero 1
• un servicio de email muy extendido
• una página de inicio personalizable muy popular
• un lector de feeds RSS muy extendido
• el sistema de gestión de RSS más extendido
• uno de los mejores servicios de análisis de estadísiticas
• la red de publicidad más grande
• la barra de búsqueda más extendida
• la web de vídeos más grande que existe; and
• Google recolecta información de millones de cuentas Google cada día

Extrapolando confianza de los datos de los usuarios

Si un usuario de google se suscribe a tu blog ¿en qué medida puede considerar Google que la atención de esa persona y su suscripción son un signo de confianza? HAce cuánto que se han suscrito? Cada cuanto interactuan los usuarios con tu blog? A qué otros sitios están suscritos? Con qué otros blogs interactúan? Qué patrones siguen sus hábitos de búsqueda y de emails?

Si otro blog enlaza el tuyo, ¿en qué medida debe google considerar ese enlace como un voto que ayude a tu blog a subir puestos en las clasificaciones (rank)? Hay algun blog popular y en el que se confíe que enlace al tuyo? Cuanta gente está suscrita a su RSS?

Mientras que servicios como Bloglines o MyBlogLog ayudan a contestar algunas de estas cuestiones, Google puede contestarlas más detalladamente que cualquier otra empresa.

Aparte de los datos anteriores, Google sabe cuándo comenzaste tu blog, lo a menudo que lo actualizas y la evolución de tu cuenta.

Por qué los blogs son distintos que las webs.

La SEO para un blog es distinta que para una web, sobre todo por los elementos sociales incluidos en la tecnología de los blogs. La SEO para blogs es menos sobre comprar enlaces o engañar algun sistema de búsqueda con errores. SEO para blogs está más centrada en dar a la gente algo de qué hablar y crear algo a lo que vale la pena prestarle un poco de atención.

La naturaleza social de los blogs

1. Los lectores de feeds RSS facilita a los lectores el suscribirse para leer cada post que escribes, y ser notificados cuando los escribes.
2. Mucha gente que lee blogs también los escribe, y muchos de ellos tiene cientos o miles de suscriptores. Si unos cuantos bloggers conocidos enlazan tu historia, puede tener un efecto cascada al leerlo muchos de sus lectores.
3. Los blogs más populares que solicitan feedback de sus lectores puede tener docenas o cientos de comentarios en cada post, añadiendo un contenido particular por el que el blog puede ser medido (rank).
4. Optimizar un blog es sobre todo atrapar la atención y teniendo fama por extender ideas, más que optimizar la web para coincidir con algoritmos de búsqueda relacionados con la importancia de la página.

Registro de dominios y alojamiento de blogs.

Los servicios como TypePad, Blogger, y WordPress.com te permiten alojar tu blog como un subdominio de sus webs. NO hagas eso! Algunos de esos servicios ofrecen características con limitaciones y pueden prohibir que pongas determinados anuncios en tu blog. Puede llevar meses o años en ganar una audiencia. En lugar de mudarse más adelante, es mejor empezar con tu propio dominio y alojarlo en un servicio de hospedaje fiable.

Puedes registrar tu propio dominio por menos de 1o dólares en GoDaddy.com. Dreamhost es un alojamiento a buen precio, y ofrecer la instalación de la plataforma WordPress para blogs, con un solo clic.

Búsqueda de palabras clave (keywords).

Herramientas tradicionales para las keywords.

Hay na amplia gama de herramientas gratis y de pago de búsqueda de keywords. Muchas de ellas, como Wordtracker, dan las palabras que la gente ha buscado recientemente.

Buscadores de keywords relacionados con tendencias (trends)

Como bloguero, no buscas solo las palabras que han sido más populares históricamente, sino lo más actual. Puedes tener una idea de lo que está pasando ahora buscando en Technorati, Google Blog Search, y Google News. Servicios como Google Trends y Yahoo! Buzz Index muestran las búsquedas más populares el día anterior.

Donde usar keywords en tu página de contenidos.

Es fundamental usar keywords en el título de tu página inicial, preferiblemente cerca del inicio de la página. Puedes usar keywords, frases relacionadas y algunas keywords populares, pero es importante que sea texto normal. Asegúrate de que tu contenido se lee bien por humanos, eso importa mucho más que lo que un robot piensa de tu contenido. Si a la gente le gusta el contenido de tu blog y lo enlazan, eso es más valioso que conseguir una optimización perfecta de la página pero sonar como si lo hubiese escrito un robot.

Los buscadores de keywords normales muestran los modificadores mas habituales, y algunos programas de gráficas como Quintura [que se ve aquí abajo y funciona para buscarlas] facilitan en visualizar palabras relacionadas en los documentos que aparecen más arriba clasificados.

Tener lo mismo que el resto de la gente

Seguidores de memes (meme trackers)

Que ideas se están difundiendo hoy? Quien está en el centro del mundo blogger? What ideas are spreading today? Who is at the center of the conversation in the blogging world? TechMeme y TailRank señalan los temas más populares sobre los que se ha escrito recientemente. También hay programas derivados de estos. El Banco Mundial lanzó su propio BuzzMonitor como un software de código abierto que cualquiera puede usar como meme tracker.

YouTube

YouTube muestra los videos más populares hoy, sobre los que más se ha hablado, y los videos favoritos del día. Muchos de estos son irrelevantes para tu blog, pero te pueden ayudar para encontrar ideas que han demostrado tener alguna repercusión.

Las nuevas webs sociales

Digg, Del.icio.us Popular list, y StumbleUpon Buzz muestran ideas que han sido populares recientemente entre los «destacadores» sociales [gente que destaca determinados contenidos para esas webs sociales] Pligg hace fácil el crear webs con nichos de ideas sociales.

Focusing On Competing Websites

You don’t have to track everything to be successful. You only have to compete in your market. If you read a dozen or two dozen blogs in your market, track who is getting linked to, and why people are talking about them, that makes it easy for you to identify and create ideas and content worthy of being mentioned.

It is easy to subscribe to competing blogs in your marketplace by using feed readers like iGoogle, Google Reader, or Bloglines. You can view links pointing at competing blogs by using Technorati or Google Blogsearch.

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Discovering New Content Ideas

Use the above mentioned popular lists to find out why ideas are spreading in related markets and past ideas that worked. From doing that research, it should be easy to tie those ideas to your own market to create remarkable ideas. Every piece of content you come across (online reading, books, pictures, magazines, conferences, personal experience, etc.) is a source of inspiration. Carry a camera and a notepad everywhere you go.

You can keep up with general blogging trends by reading Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger and Performancing.

Writing Clear & Compelling Headlines

Cory Doctorow, popular science fiction author and blogger at Boing Boing, had this to say about writing headlines in the following interview:

Write headlines as though you are a wire service writer.

Descriptive headlines help put your story in context, and make people more likely to click on your site when it appears in search results.

You can also aim to be emotionally captivating with your headlines by using your headline to ask a question or to promise solving a problem. Brian Clark offers many successful page title formulas in his Magnetic Headlines series.

Optimizing Site Structure

Highlight Your Best Content

Until September of 2007 my homepage was the most recent posts from my blog. While that helps to promote new posts on the blog, it is off-putting to people new to my field. If you create a popular blog, make sure that your homepage is appealing to people new to your field. Guide them through the learning process, show them where to start, and highlight your best content. If your site grows into a business re-invest to create tools, add forums, and other interactive features that keep people coming back to your site.

Many blogging systems allow you to highlight your most popular posts. Featuring your greatest hits puts site visitors one click away from your best content, and places more link equity on the best posts, which makes people more likely to find your site by reading one of your best posts.

Many of your readers are new to your site. Referencing some of your older articles allows them to understand your frame of reference without requiring you to write the same thing over and over again. If you syndicate content to other sites or if any spammy sites steal your content, referencing old posts increases the chances that you get free links, which will help you rank better.

Block Duplicate Content

Michael Gray offers these WordPress optimization tips in the following video:

• Place any piece of content in only one category.
• Use the WordPress more feature to only show a small portion of your post on category pages.
• Use robots.txt to block date based archives and other noisy/duplicate sections of your site.

Joost de Valk offers more WordPress optimization tips in his WordPress SEO guide.

Warning: If you are new to using robots.txt make sure you do not disallow all articles with dates in the URL if your individual post pages use dates in the URLs. Assuming you enable post slug URLs and you use categories, a robots.txt file for a WordPress blog might look something like:

User-agent: * Disallow: /*p= Disallow: /*q= Disallow: /*trackback Disallow: /*feed Disallow: /*wp-login

Categories & Tag Pages

Create categories that are well aligned with industry related keywords. Doing this will create a site structure that helps those category pages rank well for the keywords in them. If your site is focused on weight loss, then creating categories about exercise, diet programs, diet pills, and weight loss supplements make sense.

If you use both category and tag pages try to not let them overlap. For example, you would not want to create a category page named link building and then tag many of your pages with link building as a tag. It also helps to limit your use of categories to a dozen or two dozen categories at the most, instead of having hundreds of categories and tags with only a few posts in each.

Neighboring & Related Posts

Many blogs link to the previous and next posts on each page. These links are convenient from a usability standpoint, and they help search engines crawl deeply through your website. Some WordPress plugins list related posts under the current post, which helps readers find related material in case they land on the wrong page.

Fix Page Titles

Many blog content management systems place the site name ahead of the post name in the page title of individual blog posts. It is best if your page titles start with the most relevant information first. There are numerous WordPress plugins that make it easy to change the structure of your page titles. A couple popular ones are all in one SEO pack and SEO Title Tag.

Analytics: Replicate Early Success

A web analytics program can show you:

• who links at your site
• what posts they are linking at
• what people searched for to find your site

If you know the types of people who reference you AND why they are referencing your site, it is easy to create additional linkworthy content they will like. If you know what your site ranks well for, then you know what topics your site is trusted for, and what related topics you should easily rank for. Some bloggers tweak high traffic pages to add keyword modifiers to the page content, which helps them get a bit more traffic by ranking for additional keyword phrases.

Google Analytics is free. I also like Mint, which costs a one time $30 registration fee per site. Performancing and MyBlogLog offer analytics programs geared toward bloggers.

Controversy

Many people let fears control their actions, but most successful people are guided by intuition and instinct more than fear.

• Nobody likes a bully. Some bloggers are worried about getting sued or offending somebody. When I got sued my name, exposure, and profits grew overnight. That is not to say you should be reckless, but illegitimate lawsuits garner media exposure and organic trust.
• Creative destruction is part of business. In a few years people will pay to give away information that I sell today. Business people are worried about defending their copyright, but as the web gets more competitive we are fortunate to even garner enough attention to get copied.

Some self-proclaimed ethical bloggers play good cop bad cop in their marketing. In this viral video tips blog post, Michael Arrington commented about how he was disgusted by it. He could not have been too disgusted by it, given that he published it on his own site, and those pageviews made him a lot of money.

Use Push Marketing After Launching Your Site

Being Remarkable

If you are new to internet marketing, read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow to understand how to create remarkable ideas. Links are nothing but a citation. If you are remarkable the links will come, but not without a little push marketing first!

Being Credible

Most new information is spam and/or regurgitated drivel. As more spam is created using increasingly sophisticated tools, readers get better and faster at discerning information quality at a glance.

Using a default WordPress design might turn off readers. If you use a good looking template or buy a professional custom design that shows that you care, and you are willing to invest into building your site. Formatting and design improve credibility.

Being easy to contact, listing your business address, and publishing a unique well thought out about page listing your credentials makes it easier to trust your website.

Link Out to Other Blogs

We are more receptive toward marketing messages that match our biases and interests. You can’t get any more relevant than talking specifically about a person. Many bloggers track who links to them and read those posts.

Linking out to other useful related websites is one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Don’t just link to another blog and blockquote it, but make sure you add value by explaining why you think they are right or wrong. Perhaps consider asking for feedback from a person you respect or ask them if they are willing to do an interview.

Link Building

Search engines view links as a sign of trust. If you can afford it, I recommend listing new blogs in authoritative general directories, niche directories, and blog directories. Here is some background information on submitting to general directories, and Loren Baker recently posted about the best blog directories.

Advertise Your Website

Exposure leads to more exposure. Spending a few dollars on advertising today might mean that your blog gets popular a few months earlier.

• Pay per click ads enable you to buy relevant traffic from search engines.
• AdWords has a large publishing partner network called AdSense. Buying site targeted AdSense ads and Blog Ads allow you to target your ads to specific related content sites.
• Review networks like ReviewMe let you to buy reviews on popular related blogs.
• StumbleUpon ads bring visitors to your featured articles for a nickel a click.

Understanding Network Effects

Cumulative Advantage

On April 15, 2007, social scientist Duncan J. Watts published an article in the New York Times titled Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? In the article Duncan highlighted the social nature of our decisions:

People almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

Due to this group-think nature of decision making, many things remain popular only because they are already popular.

Sharing Social Proof

• Comments: If your site gets many comments people will be more likely to participate in the discussion. You can bold your «leave a comment» line or feature recent comments in your sidebar to encourage more comments. Replying to comments makes people more likely to leave additional comments. Some bloggers partner up, commenting on each other’s stories to help make their blogs look more active.
• Subscriber stats: If you have hundreds or thousands of subscribers you may want to publicly display those stats.
• Borrow Authority: Ask authoritative people in your industry for feedback or input on a project prior to launching it. If they feel ownership in the idea they not only lend credibility to it, but they may also help you market it for free.
• Publicize Your Publicity: If you or your blog were featured in the mainstream media displaying a «as seen in» section on your site helps build your authority.

Add Interactivity

People read blogs because they would rather read them than read a whole book at a time. Including pictures and video in your blog posts, and breaking up big chunks using bulleted lists makes it easier to consume (and share) your site.

Holding interactive contests and giving out awards are some of the easiest ways to get others to talk about your website, and conversation is a key to future profits. Cory Doctorow on the future of media:

Today there’s the explosion of choice brought on by the Internet. All entertainments are approximately one click away. The search-cost of finding another artist whose music or books or movies are as interesting as yours is dropping through the floor, thanks to recommendation systems, search engines, and innumerable fan-recommendation sites like blogs and MySpaces. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else’s, somewhere, and if you’re to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity. You need conversation. In practically every field of artistic endeavor, we see success stories grounded in artists who engage in some form of conversation with their audience. JMS kept Babylon 5 alive by hanging out on fan newsgroups. Neil Gaiman’s blog is built almost entirely on conversing simultaneously with thousands of readers. All the indie bands who’ve found success on the Internet through their message-boards and mailing lists, all the independent documentarians like Jason Scott, comics authors like Warren Ellis with his LiveJournal, blog, mailing list, etc.

Participate on Popular Channels to Build Trust & Exposure

• Community forums tend to have large traffic streams. Participating in popular discussion forums can help get your name out there. Community forums are a great place to look for content ideas. If people frequently ask a question in forums then similar questions get asked in search boxes.
• Writing guest articles for popular websites allows you to tap their brand equity, user trust, and traffic stream for free.
• Some bloggers host blog carnivals to build exposure and link equity.
• Leaving relevant useful comments on related blogs might lead to that blogger subscribing to your blog, and other people clicking through to your site.

Show Your Bias

Having a consistent original bias and voice makes it easy for others who share your biases and worldview to trust you and spread your message. Most (perhaps all?) popular political blogs are heavily biased.

Wait to Profit

If your site immediately places AdSense ads above the content it is going to be nearly impossible to build momentum and take marketshare from trusted leaders in your marketplace.

Setting Up a Safety Net

If many people read and trust your website, then Google is more reliant on you than you are on them, which makes it harder for Google to penalize your site for fear of the negative publicity they would earn for doing so.

Aaron’s Recent Blogworld Presentation on SEO

This presentation highlights why gaining attention is so crucial for blog growth in a competitive marketplace.

Want to Learn More About SEO?

The basics of SEO have been published many times in many places. 4 free spots to start learning SEO are Work.com: Learning SEO, Blogoscoped: The Basics of Search Engine Optimization, SEOMoz: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, and Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start.

We blog about SEO and internet marketing here, and Lee Odden has a big list of 400+ blogs about search here. Subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up with the latest search engine news.