I have cross posted this from it’s original place at the “Community of Bloggers” - an open forum for discussion of all things related to writing and running blogs.
People are increasingly using seach engines - such as Google, and Google Blog Search - to find posts on specific subjects across the “blogosphere”. If you want you blog posts to be found, your best chance is to make sure your blog is search engine friendly.
Here’s the main things you need to do…
Switch On URL Rewriting
If you have a hosted blog (such as Blogger, or WordPress.com), this will already be switched on. It basically means the URL for a specific post will have the words of the title of the post in the URL. For example, a post called “Selling Your Car” might have the URL “http://www.foo.com/posts/selling_your_car”. Search engines place a big relevance on search terms appearing in multiple places within a post.
Use Meaningful Post Titles
Make sure the title of your blog post describes what the post is actually about - for example “How to Sell Your Car and Survive” is better than “Selling It”.
Use Semantic Markup
This may come as a shock to you - search engines take a lot of notice of title tags (H1,H2,H3, etc), and style tags such a bold, italic and cite. Think about it - they have very little to go on when looking at a blog post, so they use what they can find. Therefore, think carefully when writing a blog post about the things you want to highlight, and use the semantic tags to make subtitles, sentences or words stand out. It also helps with styling, but that’s another issue.
Avoid Paid Blogging Networks
The big search engines have started tightening up on people “gaming the system” - which in blogging terms means people paying bloggers to post about products in an indescriminate fashion to improve search results for those products. Blogs writing for “Pay Per Post” have already had their “Google Rank” wiped to zero, meaning they come bottom of the list of search results even when they have the best matches for a search.