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Once you have your blog set up and ready for the public eye it is time to start promoting it. This series on Blog Promotion will take you through the steps of doing just that. Right now we are going to talk a little about getting your site into search engines.

One of the first things you need to do is come up with the keywords you will focus on for your blog, like for my Wordpress Reworked blog, the keywords would be along the lines of wordpress, themes, templates, custom, design, headers. Pick about 12 good keywords for your site and keep them in a handy place, you will reference this list for inserting tags in submission forms, meta tags, etc.

Now that you know what keywords you will be focusing on, you need to create meta tags. Even blogs have them, depending on your theme it will either be in your header.php or in your index.php file. All you need to do is go to a meta tag generator site like this one, and fill out the forms, then copy and paste the code it gives you into the section of your php file.

Ok, so you have a blog, a good list of keywords, a well written description paragraph, and completed meta tags- what next? I would recommend a sitemap. With wordpress, the easiest way to achieve this is by using a plugin, the one I use is Google Sitemaps, you install it like a regular plugin after downloading and then go to the plugin page from your admin menu (under options) and click on rebuild sitemap. It walks you through the process and submits your new complete sitemap to google- this plugin also rebuilds and pings google every time you write a post or a page so it is always up to date.

To keep up with your blogs progress at google, simply go to Google webmaster services and log in or register a new google account (free) you will then go through the steps to add a site, verify your site and add your sitemap, google walks you through this process and it is a great way to keep track of when you get indexed in google, any errors google gets and if your sitemap is working properly. (hint- to get your sitemap address go to the sitemap plugin page in your wordpress admin and you can see the url to your site map there.

Now comes the laborious part. Hand Submissions. Submit your blog to as many directories as possible. When you are prompted for a description use the one you created before while creating your meta tags. When asked for ‘tags’ use your sites keywords. The two most important/time consuming are Yahoo and DMOZ. For both of these you must first find a relevant directory and submit from that page. Yahoo will give you a lot of referrals, and DMOZ is important as this directory is used to form directory listings for Google, and many of the other major search engines. As DMOZ is run by volunteers it can take a very long time to get listed, I have heard it can be up to a year. Be sure your site is not only complete and not under construction in anyway when you submit to these or you may be rejected.

You can also add your URL to google manually, again it can take a while to get listed with google, some people get listed right away, some take longer.

A good friend of mine made this post with a list of over 125 directories listed by the page rank. They are sorted at the top, just click on the text that says “Strength 9″ or 8,7,6 etc. At the top before the article, just below the title of the page. The article below the directory strength has some great tips as well, like putting each one you submit to in an excel file to keep track of where you submit over time. Some directories will ban you for submitting multiple times. I will just let you head over to his post instead of reinventing the wheel here, he has a pretty well put together list.

You may also look into paid submission services which can start very low and get to be very expensive, or try some of the free submission services. There are quite a few companies that offer this, some of the ones I personally have used are AddMe (they have both a free and a paid option). Start Ranking is another good one, I used them a while back, I have not done the paid option with them yet, only the free. Let me know if you know of any other good submission services and I will check them out!

PS- this article has been Dugg, feel free to help me grow it by digging here!

Read the whole Series on Blog Promotion:
Blog Promotion 101 ~Intro
Blog Promotion 101 ~Search Engines
Blog Promotion 101 ~Link Exchanges
Blog Promotion 101 ~RSS Feeds

Posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 5:53 pm in SEO and Marketing | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback