Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a buzzword that most people associate with websites. However, it’s just as important to optimize your blog!

There are some similarities between the two. But there are some particular things to keep in mind when you decide make your blog search engine friendly.

RSS

Using RSS is key to getting links back to your site from other blogmasters. To encourage link exchange, write good content that they will feel is relevant to their site. A blogmaster will not just link to your site because he or she wants to do you a favor. You have to write something that will benefit their readers.

Because RSS is such an important way to encourage linking, be sure your content’s URL’s are archived and easy to link to. Remember, these will be long-term links. Do not decide to revamp your site someday and rename all of your articles. You’ll lose all of the backlinks you have built up.

Keywords

When you create the categories for your blog, you need to really think about what information people are looking for. Keyword research for blogs is no different than for websites. However, many people just randomly name their categories based on what they are writing about at the time. That is a big mistake. Take a little time and do your keyword research.

Name your categories with popular keywords. That way, when you link your blog to Social Networking sites (like Technorati or del.icio.us), you will be visited more often because you are linked up by popular keywords.

Categories

One more thing about categories. Your navigation structure should be based on keywords, not year/date relevance. If you have a Blogger blog, you can’t do anything about this because they set up categories by month. If you use WordPress, you are in full control of how you name your categories, so take advantage of it.

If you have been doing any of the above things incorrectly, you might decide to take a little time to fix them. However, make sure you do not have a lot of backlinks to a particular page before you rename it. That would be throwing a lot of hard work out the door.

A little blog restructuring now could save you time and frustration in the future. It will help you build up your backlinks and make your blog a place that people come to often for the best information the blog world has to offer!