A few of you have already taken “us” up with regard to our challenge of 100 ME Bloggers before 2009.  I have a few start-up tips for those of you that have already started your own blog and want to know “what next”.   I hope to post a few of these “tips” every month for awhile!

One of the very first things that you need to do is to have at least 3-4 good posts up on your site.  They don’t need to be written one after another, but you need to have some relevant content on your site before you should submit your site to the search engines. 

Without your site being visible to the search engines, people will not be able to find your site, regardless of your content.   There are different ways to become visible on search engines.  The first way is to tell the search engines (google, yahoo, msn, etc.) that you exists through something called “site submission”.  Another way is to have your site “linked” to sites that already are indexed on other search engines.  This “linking” is one way that search engines rate your sites relevancy in the indexes.  That is, if more people are linking to your site, you must be more relevant and therefore your site will be returned “higher” in the search results when people are looking for content that can be found on your site.

This is why it is very important for the ME bloggers (or any blogger) to have their blogrolls populated by and with other ME blogger’s sites -to create a relevancy so that our content can be found by others. 

To get started I suggest manually submitting your site to the “big three” (make sure you have content before you submit or else when the sites actually  “crawl” your site for the first time there will be literally, nothing to index), Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Manually add your site using these links:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
MSN Live SEARCH: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

When your done with that, use the free version of Submit Express to submit your site
to 20+ other search engines. It can be found here.

There are also other things that you can to do to automate and let others know your site exists such as using “ping” services.  If you are using WordPress as your blog engine, everytime you post a new post, WordPress will automatically notify a number of sites of your post.   Lorelle, is probably the most well known and respected WordPress topic-related blogger.  She has an excellent site filled with useful blogger information such as SEO and Pinging, etc.   She wrote a great article about “pinging” that can be found here:

In addition, make sure that you start to tell other bloggers that you are alive and blogging!  Comment on their sites and leave your site’s URL in the boxes that ask for it.  Sooner or later, you will be indexed.  Be patient.  Some times it can take weeks to months before your content starts popping up in the search results.   Don’t “sweat this stuff”, you’ll begin to figure it out in time.

When you look around the web for tips about “getting the word out” about your site, you will find hundreds of sites that are dedicated to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and entire companies that have formed that are making money by implementing SEO on other people’s sites.  Everyone seems to have a tip about how get your site recognized and found.  Regardless, of what you will come across, the best ways to start to have people find your site is to:

1. Have your site listed in the various search indexes
2. Actively participate in dialogs on others sites -especially bloggers in your niche! Be sure to include your site’s web address (URL) when possible. 
3. Write good, relevant content on your site.
4. Use good keywords when your write your titles and include them when possible in the various keyword areas of your post (if your blog software has them, WordPress does).  In this regard, make sure that your title accurately describes your content.  The better your title relates to your post, the easier it will be to find in the indexes.
5. Write, at the VERY least, two-three posts per month.  Sites that are more active seem to get ”crawled” more often and your content database listed in the search engines will be greater.

Sure there is more that you can do, but doing these things will be a GREAT start!  Remember you can ask questions here by commenting below or in our forums.

Looking for more SEO and WordPress articles by me?  Check our SEO/WordPress Category here.

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