Need more search engine food? Here are some other things you can do to get those search engine robots to index your blog.

Part 4 of 4: Miscellaneous Strategies

Domain Names
Choose your domain name wisely and try to include your keyword in it if possible. Have fun at register.com or your favorite domain registration site to research and find appropriate domains you can use.

Google says it looks at at the length of your domain’s registration in ranking it. That’s because many spam sites have short registrations. By registering your domain for a longer period, it can indicate that you’re building a site of substance and are in it for the long haul.

Ping Services
Ping services will ping a variety of websites for you to notify them that you’ve updated. In doing so you’ll also be letting search engines know that you’ve updated which will trigger their robots to come visit your blog. At the very least insure that your blog is pointing to pingomatic, but there are many others, too.

Site Design
Search engines appreciate well laid out, well-coded and easily to navigate sites. Is your blog viewable on all major browsers? Do your pages validate with proper code?

This often means keeping it simple, so that search engine robots can index your site a lot faster and more accurately. That means go easy on the Flash or JavaScript (and no frames!).

Offsite Techniques
Try to send out a press release and write articles for a relevant publications just might indirectly help your SEO efforts.

What’s Next?
ContentRobot hopes this series takes the fear out of search engine optimization. Sorry to say, but an “if you build it, they will come” hope just doesn’t work online anymore. Good luck!

See the previous entries in this series: Part 1: Quality Content, Part 2: Linking Strategy, and /or Part 3: Submit Your Blog to Search Engines and Blog Directories.

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.