Unfortunately, the advice gets filtered and distorted, not unlike what happens in the game “telephone” kids play. Pretty soon one or more blogs are implemented for the sole purpose and expectation of improving search engine visibility and nothing else. At least nothing else that’s accountable.

What’s wrong with this picture?   Blogs started solely for SEO objectives will inevitably fail.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. Lack of planning and oversight – After the honeymoon of starting a blog wears off, those tasked with writing content often get distracted by their other responsibilities. Bit by bit, posts look less and less like keyword optimized web pages and sink back to the familiar writing styles common to public relations and corporate marketing. Gone are the keywords that consumers are searching on. Gone is the traffic that used to come from search engines.

If SEO efforts persist, they can get sloppy without ongoing oversight either by an outsite SEO consultant or an internal blog champion (more about that in our next post). Keyword usage in blog posts can become disparate or worse, evolve into a keyword stuffing exercise.

2. No passion for the topic – With over 100 million blogs indexed by Technorati, it’s a wonder what happened to the 90% or more than have been abandoned or that don’t post more often than every 4 months. It takes commitment, thought out ideas and a sincere interest in a topic to be able to blog about it on an ongoing basis over the long term.

Can you imagine watching a 30 minute TV show or 2 hour movie you’re not interested in? How long does that last? How about a job you’re not interested in? Do you really excel at it? Do you do the best job possible and and do you stick with it? No, no and no.

As a result, bloggers who are not personally interested in a topic will encounter blogger’s block quickly and with a shallow level of knowledge on what’s being blogged about, readers lose interest quickly and do not return, subscribe or link.

3. SEO as we’ve known it is a dying breed – The loophole based SEO tactics of yore that brought incremental ranking advantages are being efficiently dealt with by search engines. So are paid links.  SEO will always have value of course, because as long as content can be searched on it can be optimized.

However, when it comes to blogs, consumer information discovery trends are involving social networks and social media at an increasing rate. Recommendations are competing with search. When looking at the web analytics of our blog and client blogs, social media traffic is in the top 5 referring sources of traffic. Blogs are social and social media sources will become increasingly important for many business blogging efforts in the coming year.

So, what can a company do to build upon and benefit from, the compounding equity that grows with long term blogging and SEO efforts? I’ll be answering that question specifically in tomorrow’s post on 5 Tips for Successful Blog Optimization efforts.

In the meantime, have you started a blog only to lose interest or stop contributing to it? What was your reason? What would you do differently?

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.

More SEO Tips

Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This page will explain most of what you should focus on along with what you should forget about.

If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings before you part with any money. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

SEO Discussion

Most SEO Professionals will not tell you about the goose that laid the golden egg. The following link will take you to a jealously guarded FREE SEO discussion.

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general