Before your blog can attract anything more than a search engine crawler (which would probably find your blog even if you tried to hide it intentionally), the first rule is… wellll… search engines need to FIND it!
Being “found” is not very hard, after all this is the search engines’ job, but what matters to your recruitment efforts is being found by the right people for the appropriate reasons and in a timely manner.
Increase the likelyhood your blog will be picked up by search engines (by that of courser I mean chiefly Google) with the following nifty checklist:
Be an expert. Pick a topic, or topics, and become the expert in those topics. Link to other people who are experts in those topics, and get those folks to link to you. The more “expert” you are at something the more likely your page will be picked up by search engines.
Include text - photos are great for traffic but Google likes to read. Feed it.
Make it pretty - plain text is easy to share but Google likes nice formatting, it sends a message that you care about your content and its not just there to attract traffic.
Make it easy - Google likes accessibility. Big font, simple color schema, no drop downs, no flash (unless the flash content is replicated in text also), no iframes or obscure site architecture that prevents the crawler from following links, etc.
Don’t stop! I mean really, keep adding to your blog - Google likes “date last updated” to be recent because it indicates how fresh (or stale) content may be, which in turn may be a great indicator of authenticity or maybe relevance. Even if that’s not the case at least it IS current :)
Get link happy - point to other sites. Google likes outbound links. If you point to other pages then you are less likely to be a spammer. Importantly, you may want to point to RELEVANT pages, so don’t just have a big list of “all my favorite things” instead keep to the same “categories” as your blog posts.
Don’t get lost! Use a map - a site map that tells Google where all your pages are. Make sure all your pages inside your blog are linked to or from some other page - Google may sometimes give the impression that it is magic, but it really can’t “divine” the location of your pages so you had better TELL it where they are.
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