Getting your blog or site indexed by search engines is the most important aspect if you want to get traffic to your blog. Yes, your blog can get indexed, if you blog on a specific niche and write quality articles. But this would take some time. Apart from writing quality articles you need to make your blog popular around the web. Its just like opening a new restaurant and waiting for people to knew about it. Instead you can let people know about your restaurant by distributing pamphlets. Similarly instead of waiting for people to read your blog, you should get your blog indexed so they visit your blog.
Join Blog Communities
One great way to get your blog noticed by Google is to submit to a number of different blog communities. These serve as directories of sorts where bloggers can submit their blogs and have them listed under their specific categories. It also helps with networking with other like-minded bloggers, but the key is that many of these blog communities rank very well in Google.
Some of the communities that you may want to try include BlogCatalog and NetworkedBlogs. After you sign up for these accounts and submit your blog, your blog will get a dedicated page on each of these communities. Make sure you provide a good description of your blog too, as well as all the usual branding items like a logo.
Use Social Bookmarking And Networking Sites
Just like the blogging communities, social media sites tend to do very well with search engines too. It is important to set up Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts for your blog. This not only helps with branding, but it helps to create a consistent “image” of your blog for Google.
Similarly, having your blog submitted to the popular social bookmarking sites can be of great value, especially if you can get your friends to “vote” them up in these networks. Some places that you may want to consider are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.
Include Internal Links And Keywords
You’ll hear it many times from all the blogging gurus: content is king. More importantly, quality content is king. When you are writing your blog posts, be sure to consider including some internal links to other posts on your blog. Once again, this indicates to Google what content it should be watching and what content is the most important.
In doing so, it is also important to have a keyword rich blog. This once again gives Google a better idea of what your site is all about and what search terms should be associated with your blog and your blog posts. Remember to write for your audience, first and foremost, but remember to keep Google in mind when you’re writing your content too.
Submit A Sitemap To Google
Internal links are helpful, but a site map is even more comprehensive and can really help Google get a better idea of what to do with your blog. To get your blog indexed in Google as quickly as possible, you’ll want to make sure that you have a site map set up.
In short, sitemaps contain all the links to all of your posts and this helps to get the Google “spider” to “crawl” through all of your content in a meaningful and systematic way. If you are confused about setting up a sitemap, there are Google Webmaster tools to help you with that.