Free Guide to Optimizing Your Blog for Google

Awesome work guys. Will be attempting to follow this guide on my new blog.

Your just so lucky Aaron to have a spouse who enjoys taking part in your work. Gah, makes me sick. A blogger's dream lol.

Aaron, look at the buttom of my page, how does it look?

http://www.igorthetroll.com/

It looks good to me. I should have matched the green color a bit better maybe, but my color looks a bit more troll-like than the Shrek color. :)

Aaron I need your help to establish notability for an anti Zlob Trojan project PHSDL www.phsdl.net that I am working on.

If I cannot establish notability per Wikipedia guideliness the project will be deleted from WikiPedia. The warning came today!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlob_trojan

PHSDL is a honeypot that catalogues Zlob redirect domains and prevents subsequent comment posting with a banned domain.

Also this project is very important for Wikipedia and for all of the Internet users, but they have their guideliness.

Please email me, and I will tell you more.

Thank you,
Igor

Hi Igor
I think you need to do more on the site design front. I know a bit about you so I can take your intent as being credible and pure, but independant third parties will find it harder to do so with a design that looks like that, IMHO.

PHSDL is Not About Looks But Technology

I wish I had time for redesign but fighting a War.

The problem is with Akismet blocking Wikipedia links because of UnSpam project honey pot setting.

If you check this list
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/comment_spammer_urls.php

You will see Wikipedia flaged as Spam.

I had a problem with SearchEngineJournal.com and Loren, he had to change to captcha to fix it.

Here it is all documented.
http://www.travelinasia.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5831

Lance Spitzner from www.honeynet.org validated the project.
http://www.travelinasia.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5793

SpamHuntress validate thee project
http://www.travelinasia.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5828

Castlecops.com validate the project
http://www.castlecops.com/posts187507-15.html

Matthew Prince from projecthoneypot.org UnSpam does not want to validate. Must be Conflict of Intrest!
http://spamhuntress.com/2007/04/24/project-honey-pot-tracking-comment-sp...

Akismet is dependend on Yahoo blog users to tag Spam, while PHSDL only editor tags Zlob Trojan ActiveX Malware redirect domains.

I even got my comments with Wikipedia links flagged on Vanessa Fox Nude blog today!

Even Andi Beard domain has been caught as Spam by Akismet.
http://www.shaunanderson.co.uk/wordpress/index.php/andy-beard-spammer/

Akismet is a wide social media network problem that will hurt all of the Internet users if not checked.

PHSDL is a solution to Akismet, that professional editors verify what is Spam domain and what is passive Spam.

Regular home Internet users think everything is Spam, they even tag credit card company's statements and other important emails if they are not expecting an email arrival and it is sent from an email server address they do not recognine, which maybe different fro authoritative bank address.

Igor Berger
PHSDL
Project Developer
and
Administrator
www.phsdl.net

But do you realize that I put days of work into writing the content featured in this blog post, and that you had no time for my suggestions and your comment does not even relate to my post?

that's what happens when you feed trolls. nice blog guide.

Thank you very much! I have not read yet, but coming from you I think must be a really good guide. I hope to read it tonight.

Aaron I am sory I went off Topic.

I looked at your Blogger's Guide and it is very professional and authoritative compelation of techniques for optimizing a blog to survive and florish in the very competetive Blogging social networks.

Excelent work!

And thank you for giving me the podium to bring PHSDL into the light for the bloggers community.

With some help of another Wikipedian we were able to avert the deletion of the original article, providing notability to its existance.

Again, thank you for your help, please continue educating the blogger community, and if there is anything I can do for you please let me know.

Respect,
Igor

Thanks Aaron just bought the book, great book and blog, I have been doing SEO for years but I was out of the loop for the last 3 years so I am playing catch up.

BTW I enjoyed this latest post as I do blogging and I dont know a thing about RSS and other feeds. I noticed the book and this blog guide dont explain how to make them.

Please help there, I know you dont teach web design to do SEO but since these feeds seem quite integral perhaps you can either teach us the ABCs or point us via a link as to how to create these feeds etc.? And what the differnces are between the feeds you have listed here for example?

http://www.seobook.com/feeds.shtml

Hi Talz11
All those feeds are the same thing...its just that people can use different feed readers to access them.

Most modern content management systems come with feeds baked into them.

So If you dont use a CMS you need to know XHTML or XML to create your own feed?

Yes, but in my opinion it is not worth the effort to hand roll feeds unless you rarely publish your site, but even then I would probably just suggest using a CMS.

Also there are some feed generator tools, but if you go to the effort to use those you might as well be using a CMS like Wordpress, MovableType, or Drupal.

Thanks Aaron.

Lots of useful thoughts in that post, appreciate it. I found a lot of the article comes down to common sense, and recognizing that you can't get famous or rich overnight :-)

I'm taking a more laid-back approach to my own personal blog, because I've made the decision to enjoy it first, and treat it as a learning experience second (installing WordPress means I'm starting to learn php), and leave gain/fame a distant third at this point. even if I have to start over later.

The one item I've re-learned quickly that's probably so obvious it does not need to be part of an "SEO for Blogs" article (you have certainly mentioned it before in other posts) is FOCUS ... I'm writing about a few different topics in my blog, and have found that this limits my readers - those that would real a blog on one topic may be turned off by a multi-topic blog compared to others, plus you dilute what your personal micro-brand is. After a few months I will split my blog into two ... one on online advertising, and one on vintage Seiko watches and misc other personal items. I knew before I started that I needed to do this, but it's one thing knowing it intellectually and another seeing the actual results.

Thanks as always (and congrats to your wife on becoming a successful part of your blog!),

Harry Bishop
http://www.harrybishop.ca

I can see you put a lot of effort on this guide. Great work!

I noticed that you did not present social media as an effective way to build the readership of a blog. Can you comment on that?

Hi Hamlet
Three big reasons:

• I didn't want to make the guide 40 pages long, adding way more than most users need.
• The guide does mention community participation in it already. I believe that if you can be relevant on a personal level you can be relevant to larger groups.
• Many of the social media sites send low value traffic, and providing real value to end users has more staying power than targeting Digg.

You can add Blogger.com to Google's hot properties...
This is really an excellent post; you guys are providing so much value to your readers on a daily basis that you deserve huge success. I'm definitely stumbling this one...

You can add Blogger.com to Google's hot properties...

The amount of data they have gets even scarrier when you think of all the stuff we listed while still missing something that big!

Stumbled. Sphunn. Delicious'd. Wish I could do more.
Thanks to both you and Giovanna, Aaron.

You guys actually reminded me of an article I recently read in National Geographic about swarm intelligence. It relates to your quick comment about social proof, but check out the wiki topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

Great post!

Awesome job! Way to put together a guide for bloggers!

I've added it to del.icio.us and shared it on facebook!

Great work as always!!

Thanks for the kind comments everyone. Glad to know our hard work was well received. :)

Aaron thank you for yesterday.
I have created a document about PHSDL in community.
http://www.phsdl.net/phsdl-in-community.php

I apologize again for coming at the worng time, but I, as an absent minded professor, did not realize the importancy of your post until latter. I glad you scloded me. I deserved your repremend.

But I am sure your users and friends will understand how generous you are toward bloggers and to other developers.

Good luck with your work,
Igor

Awesome Job and a Great post!

del.icio.us coming right up.

Would you mind I translate this article into Russian and publish in my blog?

It is Creative Commons licensed Simeon. You can translate it, mix it up, sell it, give it away, whatever you want really. It is up to you to add value to it any way you wish. :)

Thanks Aaron for this great post. Glad to see you are comming out of the "darkness"... Just kidding. Hope to keep comming back to your blog as I used to.

This guide has inspired me to finally start a blog. Is it safe to say that the most SEO friendly service to use is Wordpress?

Hi Wgrasty
Wordpress is good, but it takes a couple tweaks. Make sure you

• enable clean URLs
• watch the Michael Gray video I embedded in that article
• Optimize the page titles - as mentioned in both the article and Michael Gray's video.

Dear Aaron, I'd translated that post in catalan.

http://www.isaacsunyer.com/posicionamiento/guia-seo-per-a-bloggers/

Let me know if you want catalan Flag.

Be careful with the Spanish translation. It have some little problems.

Isaac Sunyer

Thanks for the translation Isaac. Linked. :)

learn a lot from this page.......I intend to translate it inot chinese and find out that the article have been translated.

Absolutely brilliant. Appreciate I'm a little late at reading this, but all good things come to those who wait huh? Just wish I'd found it sooner.

May now have to go out and start a whole new blog just so I can put the whole of this to use! lol

Thanks Aaron.

Glad you liked it and found it useful sanssecret :)

Hi Aaron,

I couldn't find better place to inform you that I translated the The Seo Guide for Bloggers to Hungarian.

You can find it here:
http://hungarianseo.com/keresooptimalizalas-utmutato-bloggereknek/

Flag added. :)

Thanks again for a very informative essay. I've sent a link to several people I know.

Dear Aaron,
congratulations for this excelent BLOG!! It's amazing!
I've clicked in the spanish flag about this article but doesn't run, reply an error.
I've been translating this excelent article to spanish, and If you want you can put this link in the spanish flag:
http://tuquiosco.es/internet/guia-de-seo-para-bloggers/
Afterwards, all the spanish community can read this article correctly.
Thanks.

Thank you. I removed that 404ed link :)

Could you please put some of the reference links in your document & fix the broken Youtube embeds and whatnot & then I can link it up.

updated the flag link :)

I really appreciate the clarity of this piece, as well as the level of technicality simplified. For those of us know dont know all the alphabet gobbledy-gook, it was great to have so many pointers that were actionable! As a subscriber to your 12 day trial, I can really see the value. Thanks so much.