How to Make your Blog Visible – Platform Building

You have a blog and now you wonder if anyone will read it? With over 7 billion people onearth and millions upon millions of those people have access to the internet daily, how many of them are hungering for your message? How many think similarly about the things you are passionate about sharing? Your message resonates with someone else somewhere…but how do they find you? Here are a few tips of things you can do that will help your blog be visible to your audience:

Create Heading Tags

Heading tags are nothing more than a way to use HTML (fancy geek word for techie language that computers and search engines read) to mark headings as “special”. If you use WordPress or Blogger or some of the other “package” webdesign programs heading tags are usually found in the visual menu bar at the top of the editable page where you create each new blog post. it will either appear as a large H in the menu or heading tags will be found mixed in with “Paragraph”.  They will be marked Heading 1, heading 2, etc.

• When heading tags are used to break up a post it makes content easier to scan and read as well as making your content more readily searched by Search engines.
• Use H1-H3 tags. If you get more granular than that and you will bog down the reading of your content.

Keyword in Headlines and Content

Use keywords in titles and headlines as well as sprinkled in your content. Don’t keyword stuff as that will result in pissing off the big boys like Google and Bing and even result in getting you “slapped” (banned) from their directories. Do a little research around the keywords you think that your audience is searching. Google has a free tool set (Google Keyword Tool is a good one as is Google Insights) for researching keywords for actual numbers. Using these tools will tell you how accurate you are in thinking like your audience when they search by particular terms and phrases.

Content is Still King

Content must include not only your keywords used in natural readable language, it also must be readable text style! That means no funky fonts and colors, lots of white space to entice the eyes to scan for the important parts. Bullet points are a great way to break up huge pieces of content and to emphasize the critical elements of your post. But most of all make your posts pertinent, interesting, enthusiastic, positive, and targeted to your audience. You don’t have to be a Polly Anna but you don’t want to be a raging angry lunatic either!

Name Those Graphics

Quality graphics are important as pixelated photos will make the reader click off your site faster than a ladies temperance society member will run from a fridge full of beer. Label your images with keyword rich alt attributes or what are sometimes called alt “tags” that are content related. In other words, if you post a blog about Monet’s work and techniques and the impact of his cataracts on his work you choose some of his work to use to embellish the post. Perhaps your are trying to get words like “impressionist art” and “impressionist artists” to rank as this is the focus of your blog. You will want to use a picture of a Monet painting (or two) to illustrate your points. So make those those photos ‘searchable’ you assign them alt attributes.

• If you have the images on your computer, rather than randomly assigned numbered file names, give it a specific name like impressionist art Monet so you incorporate your keyword in the file name.
• This can also be done when you insert an image directly from the internet in the html editor when you insert the photo link into your blog post’s insert photo tool. Right click on the image in it’s current online library location, select “copy image url” and then go back to your blog editor and insert that link in the url line on your blog’s photo editor, then just below it will ask for alternative text. This is where the selected keywords go!

Et voila! Not so difficult! This will boost your site with the search engine spiders.

Advertise!

Advertise – shamelessly! Promote your blog and individual posts on social communities like:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• Buzz
• Technorati
• Del.icio.us, etc.

List your blog in directories, create an RSS feed, post your blog link on your signature line of your emails, put it in your newsletters, book backs, and in anything you send out related to PR (like in your media kit). No one will sing your praises if they don’t know you exist!

Interaction and Link Exchange

Comment on interesting blogs related to your topics hosted by others, encourage and monitor comments on your own blog, participate on forums.  Read, post reference posts to other blogs and by posting a link to their site they will be more apt to cross reference their mention on your site!

Blogging is not hard work. It does require imagination and a good work ethic. Blog passionately about your passion. It really raises your online visibility and helps to create that all important platform that attracts amazingly enthusiastic audiences. You can be one of a million rather than one in a million!