Blogging and SEO strategies

Dave Taylor (www.intuitive.com)
Tris Hussey (blog.larixconsulting.com)
John Battelle (battellemedia.com)

Dave:
Keyword research pays dividends

• WordTracker
• Yahoo Search Marketing
• Google AdWords
  • You know what you want to write about - you can match that to what people are actually searching on.
• NicheBot

Keyword density:
Search engines don't know what "it" or "this thing" means. Use your keywords more than once.
But don't use your keywords too much. That gets interpreted as spam.
How do you know what your keywords are? Your research.

The way to get inbound links? Give outbound links.
Robert Scoble was at Microsoft, but linked to other companies. That made Google his friend.
If you write about companies, link to that company's home page. Yeah, they're leaving your site, but so what.

Best practices:

• Good titles
  • Make the page title relevant to the page content! It's a crime against the search engines.
• Good headlines
  • Bad: "Cool!" "Hmm." "Search engine optimization."
    
  • Good: "Free sex and alcohol" "Simply Hired, Now for Senior Gay Mothers Who Love Dogs & the Environment"
    
• Reasonable keyword density
• Occasionally emphasize keywords with bold or italics, as appropriate. This is a gray hat area.
• Good category names.
  
  • If you have categories, research your category names! What's the standard nomenclature? Plug your category names into something like WordTracker. Is there something more findable?

http://www.google.com/webmasters --> guide to making your documents more findable. Google tells you how to do this!

Descriptive domain name.

The ideal is that you don't have to think about this stuff. For example, embody this in your template. When you post, the post headline should be first, then the name of your blog - not the other way around. ("John Battelle's Searchblog -- [post title]")

The permalink is the only thing I care about. Problems on the main page can wait. Problems on the individual posts get fixed right away.

Search on site:domainname - if you get nothing back, or an error, you've been blocked.
Also check link:domainname

"I can't believe Dave just said 'hentai' on stage."

Join the conversation. You link to people, they link back, it gives you legitimacy in the eyes of the Big G.
Search engines love ecologies. Robust linking. This is why, when you leave your comment, there's a space to enter your URL. If you put your URL in your comment, it had better be really really really good and on-topic. Otherwise, the blogger will figure that it's spam - you're leaving a comment just to get a link back. Bah.

HitTail good. An easy way to get one facet of your complex traffic picture in an easy to understand way.

People at Google say, "PageRank is just an amusement at this point."

Question:
If you have a blog persona, should you leave comments as that persona? Or as yourself?

Dave: Would your character still add to the discussion? That's what matters. If your comment is good, I don't care if you're you or Wally the Widget.