Blogs: Optimizing For Blogger As A Free Blog Host
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Have you considered offering a free blog service, but hesitated? Maybe you thought your clients would not be interested in it because they could not truly optimize the blog site for the search engines, or would not really benefit from any high ranking the site receives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wayne Hurlbert explains how a free blog service can benefit those who take advantage of it, using Google's own Blogger as a prime example.
Blogs are the fastest growing class of websites on the Internet. No longer the sole domain of teenagers and the lovelorn, blogs are now an established form of Internet communication. The online business community has recently discovered the power of blogging, and are faced with raising the blog site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). As a direct result of some of the blog characteristics, high search rankings are readily available for the careful blog writer.
Like any other website, blogs have techniques for optimization. Many of them are the same as for traditional static websites, but many of them are unique to blogs. SEOs wishing to optimize their blog site face many issues, including the abundance of free blog hosting sites. Not requiring any initial cash outlay, the free blog hosts feature literally millions of blogs on their books. Google owns one of the most popular blog hosts, named Blogger and located at http://www.blogger.com.
Note that in this article, the capitalized word Blogger refers to the blog hosting company, while the lower case generic term blogger indicates the blog writer. Confusion between the two words will be avoided as much as possible.
Like all free Web hosts, Blogger hosted blogs face unique optimization challenges. Unlike sites where the domain name is owned by the webmaster, free blog hosts maintain ownership of the blog. In fact, the blog name is a sub-domain of the blog host, making value from the blog URL a less powerful optimization tool.
Despite the limitations faced by a blog hosted by Google-owned Blogger, there are many very powerful optimization techniques available to the blogger. As we will see, blogs permit the use of some optimization methods that are only available to blogs in general, regardless of host.
When considering the optimization techniques to apply to blogs, the basics of fresh keyword rich content, theme relevance, incoming links, and link anchor text all apply to blogs. In that sense optimization for blogs is no different from other websites.
On the other hand, some additional methods and some restrictions in the choice of techniques are involved as well. The various restrictions often result directly from the placement of the blog on the free host. In this case study, the free host is Blogger. These shortcomings must always be kept in mind when considering the best course to fully optimize your blog.
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