Best Blog for SEO

[Goknights]

I want to start a blog and make sure I develop it correctly the first time. What is needed besides content for a blog to be great? Anotherwords, if you were to make your blog today, what would you make sure it had.. I hope this makes sense. I see many blogs and many are identical. I want to make sure my blog is optimized for SEO.

[judyo]

You need to have it on a server with your own domain name but I'm sure you know that. I like my Wordpress blogs which seem to be pretty seo friendly. I just started my Oak Lawn one (link below) last week & it's already moving up in MSN for my main kw's.

I'm very particular how I word my Page or Post titles as that is how the permalinks get created (you should definitely utilize the permalink feature). I'm still trying to find a plug-in that will work to generate meta tags and meta descriptions but haven't been very lucky.

[webmaster]

Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and many other popular blogging softwares are all pretty SEO friendly, but you do have to put some customized work into them and think about your posting if you really want them to dominate.

[Goknights]

all of that is very helpful.. i appreciate it.. what exactly is a permalink? Oh and should I add some RSS feeds too?

[judyo]

A permalink is the url extension. A normal post would have a number & possibly a date & time but no indication what the post was about. In Wordpress you have about 4 choices on how you want your url extensions to show up. I did not want dates & times so I chose the option of just having the post title (which is shortened & hyphenated).

rss feeds are automatic with Wordpress & I'm assuming most or all other blogs. However, in Wordpress I've noticed I have to edit the code (delete a word) for it to work properly.

[pcdoc]

http://wordpress.org/

with

http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/

and

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/...rator-v2-final

Plugins.

As for Permalinks, I'll defer to Judy's judgment, but really don't see the need.

[Goknights]

Very helpful info.. Thanks a bunch.. Should I have this setup on a different domain and host and link "to and from", or same domain?
I hope that makes sense..

[Boston Condo Guy]

Kevin, I would take a look at the following article - it's a concise list of all the various config settings on blogger that would help promote your blog. I've done almost all of the suggestions, and my blogs are doing pretty well.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1060

[john@brookside]

I know I'm jumping in way late on this thread but are your (or anyone) endorsing blogger.com as a good place to create a blog. Does anyone have a recommendation for what the best "free" blog package is?

John Thompson
Samson Realty
Northern Virginia Real Estate Blog

[webmaster]

Both Blogger or wordpress are great free starter solutions