10 tips to optimize your blogging

Optimizing a blog or a website is a continuous process.  As time passes, everything changes: the value of keywords or rather keyphrases used for searching the Internet through Google search, the interest of the visitors, your target audience etc.

So, to keep the number of visitors increasing or at least static; we are writing 12 interesting points that you might apply to optimize your posts. Yes, it is very time consuming. Optimizing one post can take 2 hours or more (so, we will have to invest 2000 work hours for our 1000 posts) and Google will take another week or more (depending upon your website) to update the changes done.

• Optimize your blog every 1-2 weeks : this is grossly, not for individual posts. Look if the links in sidebar can be optimized, the footer can be optimized, page loading speed can be optimized etc. Write in a notebook about the changes you have done (so, you can revert back easily) at which date and all the details.
• Check out your stats in Google Analytics. This is must work for every 2-3 days. There is nothing wrong if you can check more frequently. This will help you to plan your future posts. The section which is / are weaker, can be strengthened; the section which is / are weakest can be ignored; the section which are strongest needs good planning.
• Look good keyphrases with which the visitors come from search engines. Are they really relevant keywords for your blog? It might happen, visitors are typing “where can I found a red apple?” and your post has the title “Red apples can be found in John’s shop round the year”. Well, Google is referring to you, because it is relevant, but try to change the title as nearly as possible as most are typing  “where can I found a red apple?” or change the meta description a bit closer.
• Check your categories and tags : When you look at your categories and tags; especially the tags, do you need all of them?  If we posted these 1000 posts with 5000 tags, would Google ever pushed our blog towards the top of search engine result page? No. We do not have any separate sub category for Google; so we use the tag Google very judiciously. There are numerous plugins for WordPress for do that job easily; but we advice you to do manually.
• Link your old posts: It might happen, you have posted an article 2 years back, now you are posting the updates  somewhat related to it as a new post. Best working example is Corrine’s blog. She is writing about Adobe Flash for many years. It will be great if she links the newer posts at the ends of older posts. For example, when Adobe Flash was of version 6, she might have written about it; now if she put links at those old posts, like “For version 10.03 read here”, it will be great. Visitor might search with “Adobe Flash update” and come to that version 6 post, obviously he / she was finding info about 10.03, not version 6. He / she will close the window thinking it has nothing to do with version 10. So, one more bounce and less pageview.
• Discuss with other bloggers : It is very important to discuss with new and old bloggers. If I ask Ankur or Corrine about any problem, obviously they will not say anything that will be harmful. One visitor emailed me few days ago, asking that, “You are saying to participate in SEO forums, but why others will want good for my blog? Its a competitive market.” Not that. People are still good enough to help each other.
• It happens, that once you wrote (specially during the first days of blogging) mentioning an date of an event in this way “In this coming new year we will post xyz at 12 am”. It was written on 2009, it becomes irrelevant now. Correct them.
• Guest post is not a bad idea, but do not make your blog a (the word that is coming is mind is not great to publish) public property. Most blog dies due to this over guest blogging and we are sure the trend will increase more in future. There are reasons why, more than those are coming in your mind right now. We will write later about it.
• Many people has the idea that free things are not good. I personally have lot of such experiences. We have a basic instinct of seeking premium things. Many people uses pirated copies instead of alternative open source free softwares. So, just like I have a page named Services in this website, put something that is / those are premium or offer Premium downloads.
• If you want to succeed with your blog, you must be different somehow from all others.  It can not be advised, it is is something that is creative. For example, no one before us has written the Windows 7 Tutorials, especially the registry hacks in such details. That way is typical of WordPress tutorials, we have combined the both.