In some recent conversations around blogging and optimizing for rankings on search engines, I got remarks on how much time that must take. I wondered how many people have the impression that it takes a lot of time and energy to SEO (search engine optimize) a blog?

I belong to a group of individuals that work as a team to review and promote each others marketing content, and blogging is a big part of that. So what better opportunity to write a blog post about what my process of blogging, promoting and SEO looks like? Here we go....

Let's say I am going to write a blog post that promotes some content I like on someone else's blog. The first thing I do while I am visiting their blog is make a comment on the content I like, and make sure I leave my blog url (which a lot of blogs ask for anyway). Including the url for my blog creates traffic back to my blog (commonly called trackbacks, linkbacks, pingbacks, pings, etc.)-search engines love this. Next, I go to my blog to make a new post. If I am promoting someone, I create a short review and summary of their content, include the url to their blog post, and publish my post. Then I go to my Facebook fan page (not profile page) and post my blog entry. Done. That's all I do. It takes mere minutes to do this, but what happens behind the scenes another story.

Now I'll describe how my blog is setup for SEO. I use a few tools to do this: Twitterfeed, the Facebook Twitter application, Ping-O-Matic, the Wordpress plugins 'All in One SEO Pack' and 'Google xml sitemaps' and Traffic Geyser (which utilizes a Wordpress widget).

I have a Wordpress theme that does not have SEO built in. So I use All in One SEO pack to take care of that. This plugin not only takes care of general SEO for the entire blog, but also allows me to set titles, descriptions and keywords for individual posts and pages.

Each time I publish a new post, the Google xml sitemaps plugin rebuilds an xml sitemap of my blog site and notifies Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com of the new content and the entire site map. I have to say it's really cool to see my entire blog contents in a site map right on Google, which by the way for my main keyword I have the first handful of results on Google.

Also each time I publish a new post, the new content is sent to Twitter via Twitterfeed with a shortened url. From there, the Facebook Twitter application sends the content to my profile wall (profile, not page). Because I also posted the content to my page wall, the Facebook Twitter application for pages sends the info to Twitter, which then winds up on my profile wall again by virtue of the first Facebook Twitter application (there are TWO different Facebook Twitter applications-one grabs content from Twitter and copies to your profile wall, the second sends information from your page wall to Twitter).

Finally, I use Traffic Geyser for video syndication. But TG also has a really cool widget for Wordpress that sends all new blog posts to Traffic Geyser, which then sends the content to about 8 different social bookmarking sites, which of course link back to your blog. As an aside, any time I post a new video with Traffic Geyser, it notifies my blog which then notifies the social bookmarking sites which link back. Cool eh? Oh, Traffic Geyser is a paid subscription, but I'm serious about my SEO.

The only utility I have not mentioned yet is Ping-O-Matic. It's a manual utility that pings the search engines that content has changed on your blog. I describe it in detail on my blog. A little redundant, but adds exposure.

So as you can see, with a mere 10 minutes to make a new post, within an hour it is splattered all over the internet automatically. It took a few hours to get all this set up-and I tweak it every now and then-but the payoff is priceless. Some of the best SEO tips I have ever tried.

There are countless ways to do SEO for your blog, and the way I do it is just a sample of a few of them. If you have any questions about my methods I am always glad to respond. My examples may also lead you off on your path to creating your own unique system which I highly suggest. I hope my blog SEO tips help you in some way.