Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can help bloggers receive more hits to their blog’s home page as well as each of the individual articles they post. It may also improve the usability of their blogs at the same time. The following SEO checklist is useful for bloggers who wish to determine if their blogs are in need of additional optimization; consider printing the checklist out for future reference, and mark each item you answer “yes” to:

Checklist For The Blog Itself

- Is there a separate web page for viewing each of your individual blog posts? This lets them show up as separate search results and improves SEO keyword density.
- Can links to each page of your blog be found in a Site Map or other index?
- Do all of the pages have their own title tags specific to each entry’s content? Don’t just use the blog’s name for every title.
- Are there attractive title and description tags on the blog’s home page?
- Has your weblog been submitted to the major blog directories? Most allow bloggers to submit their blogs for free.
- Is your blog’s menu system accessible to search engine spiders? Try using it in a text-only browser like Lynx.

Checklist Questions For Bloggers

- Do you regularly ensure that unrelated comments and “comment spam” are promptly removed from your blog?
- Are you checking to see if your blog entries have a keyword density which is too high or low?
- Do you avoid using the same words and phrases repetitively in separate blog posts? Entries should be different enough from each other to appear as separate results.
- Are there relatively few unrelated words (menus, copyright notices, etc) on each page?
- Is most of your blog content original material which does not appear on other sites? Unique content is usually more effective in SEO.
- Do most of the links on your blog connect to web sites with content related to its subject? Avoid reciprocal linking with sites on much different topics.

Bloggers for whom most of these SEO checklist items don’t apply should consider working toward better optimization, which will enable them to gain more traffic with less promotional effort in the long-run. If the number of unchecked SEO tasks seems overwhelming, bloggers can consider paying someone else to complete them and/or work on them one step at a time.