So you have a cool blog with a sizeable readership. Excellent! Have you thought about the ever-growing number of people with smartphones who want to read your blog? It is quite easy to make your blog available to them.

You can install the wptouch plugin that will add a new theme to your blog, making it look like and work like an iPhone application. This enables  the iPhone, Blackberry, Android and other mobile phones users to consume your blog posts easily, while on the go. Check this mobile web site design blog (www.webile.co.uk/blog/) from your phone to see an example.

If you are hesitating to tinker with your blog, we can install and activate the plugin for you for a nominal $25 per blog. Get started by just giving us a few quick details in the form on the right.

Are you tracking the terms that people are searching for, using the site search option of your website? These can give vital clues to the keywords that you are not targeting clearly on your home page.

Say I have a blog that talks about my web design service. Now if I discover that lots of people are searching for 'prices' through the site search option, I will get a signal that lots of people are interested to know what kind of prices I charge. If I make this aspect of my service clearer on my home page, I will be able to retain and may be convert more of my visitors into prospects.

An easy way to track this statistic is through Google Analytics. Yu should edit the site profile option and activate the site search option as shown in the picture here. Click on the 'Do track the site search' option and then enter 's' in the query string parameter. Save the settings and Google Analytics will now start tracking the site searches for your blog.

Do you want your blog to rank higher in the search engines? Did I hear a loud 'Yes, of course!'?

While we all understand that posting regularly with quality and unique content is the most vital thing you can do to get better search engine rankings, here are a few more tips to improve your results:

• Link 1-2 times to your money pages (main site, sales pages) with keyword-rich anchor text. Vary the anchor text – don't use the same text always.
• Link to other posts in the blog. This increases the number of incoming links to those pages and improves their ranking potential.
• The links should be included in the main content. Sidebar links carry less weight.
• Use the main keyword at the beginning of the post title and a variation near the end.
• For longer posts, use H2 and H3 tags in the sub-headings to break up the posts.
• Have a juicy introduction para that draws a causal visitor in to the post.
• Have a nice summary as the last para with a powerful call to action, sending the visitor to the main sales page.
• Keep your blog software updated. The new versions include features for better SEO, while providing more security against hackers.

These quick-to-implement tips will definitely give your rankings a nice boost. Please share your experience with other fellow readers.

If you have a Semiologic blog, you don't have to use a short-url service like TinyURL where you can't change the destination later. This is also great for the control freaks who are very scared to use a 3rd party service.

The redirect feature on a Semiologic blog is quite simple and works very nicely if you don't have a long blog address. Here is how I created a redirect to my reference link for Semiologic:

1. I verified that the redirect manager plugin was activated. You can activate it if it is not activated.
2. Then I added a new page. I gave it a short and direct name – Semiologic.
3. I entered nothing in the content area and scrolled down to the lower side where there was a box for the redirect URL. Here I entered the destination URL.
4. Saved the post.

That's all. Now if I type www.rentablogger.com/blog/semiologic, it gets redirected to my reference link for Semiologic blogging system. This is a 301 redirect, comes with my blog URL and therefore promotes my brand instead of the URL-shortening service's brand.

If I ever had to change the target URL, I can easily do so from my site.

Note: If you don't want to have this page included in the Sitemap, you should tick on the options shown here.

Are you worried about search engines like Google slapping a duplicate content penalty on your blog? Did you know that your blog posts can be accessed through multiple URLs which Google can consider as duplicate pages? Why not give them a subtle advise on which are your favorite URLs to get your content indexed?

For example, check this URL for this blog post:
http://www.rentablogger.com/blog/2009/03/12/avoid-duplicate-penalty-on-blogs/

Now someone may link to this post with his affiliate URL:
http://www.rentablogger.com/blog/2009/03/12/avoid-duplicate-penalty-on-blogs/?affid="A02"

And if Google discovers both the pages, they will think we have duplicate content here and at will, index one URL and ignore the other.

Webmasters and blog owners have been stuck with this issue for long. However the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) recently agreed on the specs for a special meta-tag that will help them them identify the real URL. You can specify this in the head section (I shortened the URL to fit the window):

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.rentablogger...on-blogs/" />

This is a message to the search engine that we prefer to get this page listed under this URL. Please note that you are not ordering them to do so. They may act otherwise if they see a large number of places linking otherwise. Also you cannot point the engines to URLs under a different domain.

You can get a simple plugin to tackle the canonical URL problem here (courtesy - Joost de Valk)

Do you know Google is now giving less weight to run-of-site links (the ones you put in the sidebar or footer, available on all the pages)? It is much better to link to your favorite sites from the content – the blog post itself.

The reason is simple – we won't think much before putting a link to a golf-training guide on a dog-related site's sidebar. However the relationship has to be much closer if we were to link to it from the content. Thus it is fair to assume that a link from the content is a closer-in-context link as well as lesser likely to be a spam link (mass link exchange or paid-for link). And search engines tend to treat this as a more valuable link.

You should integrate Google Analytics on your blog to get an insight into the traffic sources and update the settings and posts accordingly.

While this does not directly help in SEO of your blog, once you get to know which keywords people are using to land up on your blog, which search engines are sending you the traffic and other such information, you can make a plan to make suitable posts to serve these people.

I personally look at the bounce rate of the various pages on a high priority. If some pages have a high bounce rate, I check that to see if I can introduce some hooks to get people to stay longer on that page. You can add the related posts plugin to add some stickiness.

Don't forget that your home page may have a high bounce rate because the repeat visitors will just read your latest post and go away.

Want to keep your visitors on your blog longer? The more they read, the more they are convinced of your expert status. This will definitely increase the chance that they will buy whatever you are offering. Here's how to achieve this "stay longer" target:

Use the related posts plugin to show a few related posts just after your blog post. This way when a visitor has finished reading your blog post, she gets to see a quick list of some more posts on similar topics. Hopefully she will find one of these interesting and go ahead and read that. Then she will get another list of related posts and … you get the message.

1. It is quite easy to accomplish this on a Semiologic blog.
2. Click on Appearance | Widgets.
3. Choose "Each entry" in the dropdown in top-right side and click on show.
4. Add the Related widget from the list of available widgets (middle column list). The widget will be added to the list of widgets being used in each entry.
5. Click on Save changes. The settings are saved and the list shows again.
6. Now drag and drop the Entry: Actions widget to the end of the list. This is done to make sure that the related posts do not appear to belong to the next entry.
7. Click on Save changes again. You are done.

View the blog to see the effect. Now your visitors will be staying on your blog longer than before.

If you don't feel confident you can pull it off or are strapped for time, we can apply these SEO changes to your blog for a nominal feel. Contact us!

Did you know that your blog post tiles are very important for the SEO of your blog? There are some simple but important considerations to get your post (more) popular. Are you doing it the right way?

You must have heard that you must spend 5 times more time on your headline than your sales page. It applies equally well to the blog post titles. A good curiosity enhancing title can make more people consume your post. Here are some interesting options for the post title:

• How to <do whatever you are writing about>…
• 7 (or some other number) ways to <something you are writing about>…
• Are you making these mistakes <in your whatever>? Or some other question?

You will notice that Wordpress or Semiologic will create a slug from your title that will become part of the URL. You should edit this to take out all sundries like did, or, of, the etc while keeping the meaning intact. Think newspaper headlines. Study how they create a meaningful sentence with the minimum words.

As a final tip (only applicable if you are using Semiologic or a SEO-plugin enhanced Wordpress), edit the title of the page. Normally the title of the page (the meta-tag, not the headline) is same as the blog post title. You can edit this to score well on the SEO front while retaining a different blog post title.

You can see the image on the left to see how you can enter a specific set of meta tags for each post.

Further to my earlier post about improving the SEO potential of your blog with a suitable title, today I will like to cover the use of tags to improve the rankings.

In all your posts, you should add a few tags related to the subjects, name of people or other important topics that the post covers. Note that the tags are different to the category. While there are only a few categories which indicate the main subject of the post, tags are specific to this post. You can use some generic as well as some long tail tags to mark this post.

I will be putting this post under the Blog SEO category but will use several tags – some general, some very specific. The tags pages can help a lot in distributing link juice to the different pages and are very useful for SEO.