Blogging Tips: Interlinking And Date Stamps
A recent post on problogger reminded me of two tips I got from my initial meeting with Blogware that got me into blogging.
Blogware explained that two of the reasons why blogs fared so well in search engines was because of interlinking and time & date stamps.
Interlinking
(i) Search engines tend to rank more highly pages that are linked to by similar pages. So even though by interlinking your pages you are essentially linking to yourself, some search engines see this as a sign of relevancy as at least you are writing about the same topic.
(ii) Problogger points out that Search Engines index blogs by sending robot crawlers to sites to track what you’ve written and to follow the links.
Interlinking your blog will make this easier for search engines as they can crawl your site more quickly and effectively. Most SEO experts recommend that you provide some sort of Site Map that means every page on your blog is just a link or two away from every other one. One way to do this for bloggers is to make sure that your category pages are in your sidebars.
After I read this on Problogger, I realised that even though I knew this fact, in my tinkering with my site design I hadn’t thought about the impact of removing my category navigation. Sometimes you can get so carried away that you forgot about the small, but important things. Hence I have now added back in a new category navigation at the top of every page, which should help out both search engines and my readers.
Time & Date Stamp
The other explanation Blogware gave me for why blogs receive a disproportionate amount of traffic is because in their system every post has a time & date stamp. Search Engines love this as to them it is a sign of relevancy as the content is fresh.
I’m amazed by how many sites don’t put a time & date stamp on posts. Again, such a simple step that can have a huge impact on traffic.
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[...] browse around, and read some articles, and I find my self got reminded of 2 things which are definitely essential in blogging and Search Engine Optimization. It explained that two of the reasons why blogs fared so well in [...]