This is part 3 in an ongoing examination of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies you can use to gain traffic, boost your PageRank and Alexa rankings and increase your Technorati authority. Although no strategy is perfect, you can employ the things I discuss here and they should help at least somewhat.

Part 1

Part 2

How Often To Post

The number of posts per day or per week can have a direct effect on how often your users come to your site. If you only post once a week, people will tend to check your site much less than that. If you subscribe through an RSS reader which I highly recommend, you get a summary of all the most recent posts, usually about 8-10 posts. The benefit of this if you don’t post frequently is your readers can see all the topics at once and save them up for one sitting. When I work from home I check blogs quite often and some sites like John Chow, Everybodygoto and Gadgetastic post several times a day simply because they have a lot to talk about. So how often you post is really up to you, there is no set standard. I will say that more frequent posts tend to keep more readers around because they get used to your schedule and come back often.

What Really Matters

Aside from keeping your readers interested, which should be the focus of your blog, you want to post at least often enough to keep your content fresh. Remember when I said content is king? Let me expand on that by saying fresh, original content is king.

The single biggest mistake you can make when creating a blog is to copy someone else’s work. There are ways of aggregating entire posts and I don’t recommend it. For one thing, you will kill your potential PageRank from Google since duplicate content always goes into a supplemental directory. We like to call it “Google Hell”. Try a search on that term and you will find several dozen articles about it. Once relegated to the supplemental index in Google it takes weeks to get out of and the only way to do it is to remove all of your duplicate content. If you use WordPress, you can download the Duplicate Content Cure plugin from Free SEO Tools. This will tell the google spider not to index those pages that have duplicate content, thus keeping them from showing in the supplemental index.

The reason you want to keep content fresh besides being interesting to readers is because Technorati, which many use to determine the value of a site as well as the number of readers it has, bases it’s authority ranking on the freshness of content. So if you aren’t posting at least once a week, your ranking with Technorati isn’t going to move much.

Final Thoughts

I mentioned one WordPress plugin to help with supplemental listings on Google but there are several others. Here are some that I use:

• SEO Title Tag
• All in one SEO
• Google Sitemaps

Using these plugins and keeping my content fresh and interesting has worked for me. My supplemental index is now down to a minimum, especially on my other investing blog which originally had over 700 posts in the supplemental index which was just killing my SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). Hopefully these strategies will help you too.

Related Posts:
SEO Strategies Part 2 – Promotion and Marketing
SEO Strategies Part 1

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