I'm sure by now many of you fellow bloggers at USD have noticed that this blog is at the top of the hot blogs list everyday without fail.  In fact this blog tends to average 50-200 hits more per day that the second most popular blog for the day on this server.  More interestingly enough, almost NONE of the hits appear to be from the USD community.  To add to the mystery, I haven't added a post in over a month.  So what is drawing hits to this page?  In this blog post I reveal the magic behind making a blog hot.

In the Blog Content 

The most important influence for getting your site to appear in a set of search results is going to be the content of the page.  Needless to say there is little to index on a blank page (not that I haven't found ways to do it).

Knowing Your Content

The most important thing you can do is know and describe your content.  When you make a blog post, assign it a meaningful name.  Something catchy helps, but it is more important that it is descriptive.  Keep it short because it needs to be human readable.

Always complete the (optional) summary field.  It makes the landing pages of your blog more user-friendly and it gives the search engines more to index.  I usually use the first paragraph of my blog as my summary.  It should, however, actually summarize your content.

Define tag fields for your blog post.  It helps associate your entry with similar entries.  Three to five meaningful words is plenty; less is more.  I'd recommend looking around and seeing what other people blogging about the same topics use as tags, then use those exact same tags.  This applies to assigning keywords for your sites too.

Organize your posts into categories (and sub-categories).  Also try to stick to just one topic per post.  If you have more to talk about that day, consider making two or three posts.  Like your posts, your categories should have meaningful names and descriptions.

In The Context

Watch how you word things within your blog posts.  Use common phrases from a field or topic.  I'm not saying you should be buzz-word heavy, but you should use a dialog that is consistent with what other similar bloggers use.

Be sly about what other words you include in combinations.  For instance, if I mentioned the University of South Dakota I tend to try to find a way to use the word 'state' in a meaningful way.  Why??  Because the combination of the words "University, South, Dakota, State" will help draw results from people looking for "University of South Dakota", "Dakota State University", and "South Dakota State University."  Again, you need to be smart about it. Don't make it obvious to your users what you are upto.  You are fooling the search engines, not people coming for valuable content.

Which reminds me; make sure your content is valuable.  You're blog is a tool to communicate, vent, etc.  But some people just don't care about the booger you picked at work and wiped under your desk.  If the blog is full of content filler, then the good stuff will get lost in the jumble.  Two good posts are worth more than twenty random ones.

Web Accessibility and Compliancy

With all these nifty WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editors it is easy to forget about what is going on underneath your blog.  If you aren't at least somewhat XHTML literate then you have little control over this.  However, many of you are savy enough to pick it up with little difficulty.

Some simple things to keep in mind are:

1. Organize items into lists like this one.
2. Use the acronym tag for all acronyms.  Acronyms are supposed to make your post easier to read, not easier to write.
3. Assign images alternative text attributes.  This helps your images appear in google/live image searches.
4. Make sure your code is XHTML compliant.  Non compliant code may not be parsed properly by a bot or crawler.
5. Use header tags to show hierarchical structure in documents.
   

Linking Referers

You've heard the saying, "It's who you know, not what you know."  Well the same is for your website.  Some search engines like Google rate the popularity of your site based on how many other sites mention yours.  Getting a link to your site on another site not only offers a portal for users to get to your site, but it improves your search ranking.  There are many of ways to do this.

Link Your Sites Together

Most active users on the net have multiple outlets on the net.  This could include portfolios, profiles, online journals, even fan listings.  You can use these other sites of yours to make your blog (and other sites) more popular on the net.  A link list is the most simplistic way, but can be too obvious if the content is unrelated.

Try randomly mentioning one of your other sites when the topic is relevant.  For instance, earlier this summer I read Jacqueline Carey's book Kushiel's Dart.  It's not appropriate here, but in another post it might be.  Either way, I could spark interest in a user to visit my other site or I could point a crawler towards that site for further indexing.  That fan site is interesting because the truth is I'm not as interested in Jacqueline as it would appear, but the content on that site pulls more visitors to my domain than any other site.  Many trickle back to the domain home and on to many of my other sites.  It's an SEO experiment who's details belong in a later post.

If you are desperate for hits or references, you could consider becoming active in community sites where your web presence will become more prominent.  Ones like Windows Live Space which offer a public profile are most beneficial.  For instance, I participate in 11 sites, including 7 forums, 6 blogs, and 7 community builders.  I won't list them all here, but you can strategically mention them.  You don't even have to be all that active on all of them.  If you are smart, you can double post content across your sites.

Get People to Link to You

Nothing can help you more than getting other blogs or websites to link to your sites.  Depending on the nature of the site it may be as simple as asking, but more often than not you have to offer something in return.  For instance, if you have valuable, unique content they may choose to link your page so that their users can go view that content.  Likewise, if you reference something you researched on another site you should provide a link.  It helps out the author and it will help your users find more useful content.

Roll Out The Technology

Aside from the content of your blog, there are some things you can do in the background to help improve your search ranking.

Page Title and Meta-Tags

Add meta tags to the head section of your documents.  I've modified my Apache Roller Template to strategically add descriptions and keywords to my pages based on the content of my page.  Make sure each page title is unique and that that page has a unique description and a set of meaningful keywords.  This is the code I used for improving my blog's meta tags:

#if ($model.weblogEntry)
  <title>$model.weblog.name: $model.weblogEntry.title</title>
  <meta name="description" content="$model.weblogEntry.summary" />
  <meta name="keywords" content="$model.weblogEntry.tagsAsString" />
#elseif ($model.weblogCategory)
  <title>$model.weblog.name: $model.weblogCategory.name</title>
  <meta name="description" content="$model.weblogCategory.description" />
#else
  <title>$model.weblog.name: $model.weblogPage.name</title>
  <meta name="description" content="$model.weblog.description" />
#end

Know How People Find You

More often than not users are going to hit your site by accident (and then probably leave).  This is ok, their visit at least got them in the door.  Sometimes, however, your site will have exactly what they were looking for and they will stay awhile.  If you are lucky they will return again.

It's important to know how those people got there and what they were looking for.  If you manage the server hosting your site you can use a tool like AwStats to track details.  However, I've discovered that Google Analytics is far more useful and will work on any site you have posting access to.

Google Analytics will tell you how many people hit your site per hour/day/week/month etc.  It will tell you what country they came from, what browser they were using, their connect speed, even which search phrase and search engine they used to find you.  The information gathered is intensive.  The point is, you can use all of this information to tailor your website based on what is or isn't working.