If you’ve spent any kind of time in the social media space, undoubtedly, you’ve heard the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In layman’s terms, SEO is a way to make sure that search engines find your blog. Why is this a big deal? To put it bluntly, no one is going to read your content if they can’t find it, which is where SEO comes in. SEO is all about links—linking to other blogs will bring traffic to your site, as will other people linking to your site.

Writing great content on a regular basis is only a fraction of the equation—the more frequently you post, the more likely you are to be established as an expert, rather than as a merchant who is merely looking to sell goods. As you add content and spread your ideas, your following will grow—in fact, popular bloggers can build up hundreds, or even thousands, of readers who eventually subscribe to their blogs. Readers who link to your blog posts will help boost your search engine rankings for the other parts of your site.

So what can you do to fully optimize your site and drive traffic to it?

First, the Basics

When creating your blog, these are the “why didn’t I think of this” things that make a big difference:

Unique Site Design

Your site should be unique and consistent with the brand impression you wish to convey. Readers are more likely to trust and subscribe to sites that are:

Be Kind to Your Readers

One of our favorite bloggers has the unfortunate habit of writing lengthy, detailed entries without a single paragraph break, plus they’re in a smaller-than-usual font size. This means that her entries are as painful to read as they are long. Make sure that your blog entries are broken into paragraphs, rather than dooming a reader who might get distracted to get lost in your “wall of words.”

Spelling

Spell Check is your friend. Use it before publishing.

Font

The font size and style need to be easy to read. Design the text of your blog entries to use a standard font in a standard size

Create Unique Content

Bloggers love to link to other bloggers. Generating fresh, original content (instead of rehashing what’s already been said by someone else) increases the odds that someone will find your content interesting enough to link to and talk about. And a reader of that blogger’s blog might read the entry and decide to write something about what you said, as well, meaning yet another link. And if you are lucky, it will go viral, which means that several bloggers in your market space are talking about what you wrote. Rinse and repeat as often as possible for maximum exposure and link juice.

Avoid Too Many Widgets

When adding widgets, decide how necessary each one actually is. Having a large number of javascripts can slow down your site. So don’t sacrifice timely loading time for nice-but-not-all-that-necessary widgets.

Own Your Domain Name

There are so many reasons why you should own your domain. First and foremost, your domain is an embodiment of your brand. Don’t let someone else own your brand.

NOTE: See also our related story, Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain

Use Great Categories

When you write a post, place it in 1 to 3 different categories related to the post. For example, an article on the television show Grey’s Anatomy could go under “Grey’s Anatomy” and “ABC”. Avoid the temptation to add it to ten different categories though, such as including “drama,” “hospital,” “interns” and “Seattle” because that is just overkill. But if you wrote something great on Grey’s Anatomy, you have made it easy for your reader to find all your posts on Grey’s Anatomy because they simply have to click on the category link at the top or bottom of the entry.

RSS Me!

You need to have RSS available so that your readers can subscribe to every brilliant word you post. If you are currently a Feedburner user, be sure to check out their new MyBrand option, which allows you to host your own feeds for a seamless user experience.

Offer RSS & Feed Subscription Buttons

FeedButton offers a service that allows you to offer multiple RSS aggregator and feed reader buttons with a single expanding rollover button.

Offer Posts Via Email

Offer people an option to get your blog posts by email instead, as many readers may not utilize RSS feeds. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.

Decide What Kind of Feed to Offer

You have options when it comes to RSS feeds. One is to offer two feeds—one being an ad-supported full feed, with an RSS ad included, and the other being an ad-free snippet copy of the feed. Readers won’t see ads, but will have to actually view your blog in order to read your full entry. Decide which format you prefer, as well as what format best suits your readers.

Write Compelling Descriptions

If you do use snippets for your RSS feed, they should be intruiging and leave the reader wanting more, which will encourage them to click and read the full entry. This will earn you many more readers than if you use the default option of including the first X number of words in the blog post as the snippet. Use your excerpts to generate interest and clicks.

Navigation

Don’t just link to the main page of the blog. Syndicate your recent headlines in the sidebar to encourage visitors on the main site to check out the blog, too. Also, make sure that the navigation to your blog is simple—too many blogs sit unread because visitors can’t find it.

How Fast is Your Host?

Don’t lose readers because your hosting company thinks 30 seconds is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to load up a page.

Have Descriptive Titles

Your titles need to be brief and should enhance the entry, making it clear what your entry is about.

What not to do: “Jason’s Tech Industry Rants & Ramblings Blog >> New Xbox 360 title announced for April release”

Unless you are well known as an authority blog in that market, the blog name is simply wasting crucial space at the beginning of the title tag.

Instead, try: “New Xbox 360 title announced for April release”

Ensuring you have great titles when you have a small readership and are depending on search engines to send you readers is one of the first steps you should take to optimize your blog.

Look at your Cascading Style Sheets

Place CSS in an external CSS file. When you don’t place CSS in an external file, it can clutter your pages and result in the most important part of the page - the entry text - being much further down in the HTML code when it has to go after the masses of CSS coding lines.

Feed the Bot

The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot and other bots will stop by on a regular basis. If you only post sporadically, expect that it might take a while for Google to realize that you actually have updated again. Google loves updated fresh sites, so it make sense to feed the bot what it wants.

Spread the Link Love

If you are blogging about a story, link to the original story as well as other’s commentary on the same topic. When you do so, you will often make those bloggers aware of your blog’s existence when people click from your blog to theirs. And it also increases the odds that they will either link to you on that story or on something you blog about in the future.

Be Aware of Your Anchor Text

When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here”, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry, such as “Jason’s scoop on the new Widget Xbox 360 game.”

Use a Related Posts Plugin

Getting readers to look at other posts on your site not only makes sense, it allows you to deep link from a current page on your blog to older entries. Older entries are often buried several pages deep on an archive page, but this plugin allows you to showcase entries written months or years previously and give those “oldies but goodies” an extra little kick in the search engines. There are several related post plugins available depending on your blog platform.

Ping Other Sites

When you add a new blog entry, you might want to ping site such as Technorati and FeedBurner to let them know you have a brand new blog entry on your site. You can also now ping Google’s Blog Search as well for faster indexing in their blog search engine at blogsearch.google.com. Automatic pinging is an option in the control panel of most blog platforms including WordPress and MovableType. And Ping-o-Matic offers a service that allows you to quickly pick and chose what to ping.

Manage Your Trackback & Comment Spam

You should not allow Google or Yahoo to find masses of spammy links on your site to all manner of less-than-quality sites submitted to your blog by a blog spammer. Use one of the many tools on the market for your blog platform to manage both comment and trackback spam.

Use a Good URL Structure

Don’t use “permalinks” such as www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123 . Instead, use www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_here. Most blogging platforms allow you to change from the standard numbered permalinks to this style of search engine friendly ones. However, if your blog platform you use has funky dynamic URLs for each entry, you will want to ensure that the bots can crawl them easily or use a mod rewrite to create a good structure such as in the example.