Marketing Your Weblog to the Search Engines

Getting search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to index your weblog posts in a high position and send traffic to your website is not an easy task. However, with a little time, patience and work, it can be done. In this article, we'll explore a few easy ways that you can drive additional traffic to your weblog using search engine optimization or SEO.

First - if you're not using WordPress for your weblog platform, you should probably switch. WordPress includes a ton of "proper" SEO items out of the box, and the remainder of things you need to SEO your weblog can be added through plugins such as HeadSpace or All-In-One SEO. Install WordPress on your web server using their handy guides, and transfer your posts from your previous blog installation over to WordPress. You'll also need to sort yourself out with a theme design for your website - but you can find many of these for free by searching Google. You will also want to install Google XML Sitemaps, which will create a search engine-valid XML Sitemap AND submit it for you.

If you're not using WordPress, you're in for bit slower of a time. You can use online tools to create your sitemap and submit it in to the search engines for you. You can also use other free tools that will get the search engines to visit your site and index your content for you on a regular basis. One of these such tools is called an XML-RPC Pinger, which when used correctly will cause the Google spider and Google Blogs spiders to visit your site and index your new blog posts almost immediately.

It's important to note that you will need to ensure that you are writing content that is at least 70-80% unique when compared to other content that you can find online. If you're planning on just copy and pasting the writings of others, you will soon find that your blog gets penalized due to "duplicate content penalties".

Finally, you will want to ensure that you are writing relevant, unique content regularly. You don't need to be posting every single day, but it's best to get at least a couple of fresh blog posts up a week to ensure that the search spiders are revisiting your site on a regular basis. When you post through a system such as WordPress, your blog will automatically "ping" weblog posting notification sites to let them know that you have posted a new post. This, in turn, will assist with getting your new blog post and content indexed and up on the search engines quicker.

There you have it - a few easy tips for getting your weblog content up and into the search engines much quicker, and therefore increasing your exposure to visitors. As long as you make sure that you are serving up unique, interesting and relevant content to your users, the search engines will reward you with increased placement, higher rankings, and more traffic. Which of course, you are making use of through advertising and affiliate marketing. But that's a whole other topic for a whole other article...