Things To Do Besides Directory Submissions
After you have finish developing the layout and content of your blog. There are other things that you must also do in order to promote your blog. It is not likely for search engines or internet users to know your blog even if your blog is interesting or the content is powerful as ever. There are other stuff that you should put in your schedule and this other stuff may consume time longer than the time you used to build the content or layout of the blog.
Try searching for your blog in a search engine, example for blogger, type in http://yourblogname.blogspot.com and see whether the results contain your blog address or not. If it doesn't, this means that your blog isn't listed in the search engine yet, and search engine bots haven't crawled your blog. If this is the case, you will have to submit your blog url to search engine in order to be listed. How to do this? It's easy, if your blog have good content that is. We'll talk about that later in this article, because first, you have to add Meta Elements to your blog.
Meta elements is some code that you have to put in your blog, but it is not for your visitors to read. It is for the search engine results and search engine bots. This is important, as the meta element will be shown on behalf of your blog in search engines result. If you didn't add any meta tags, then bots will just take any content from your blog, and sometimes, it is inappropriate. So, the question now, how does meta elements look like? Look at the example below, change it according to your blog title, keywords, and description and put it on your blog.
<title>Your Blog Title</title>
<meta content='Keywords1, keywords2, keywords3' name='keywords'/>
<meta content='Your Blog Descriptions' name='description'/>
<meta content='Your Name='author'/>
<meta content='Your Blog Title Or Company Name' name='copyright'/>
<meta content='global' name='distribution'/>
<meta content='all' name='robots'/>
<meta content='general' name='rating'/>
<meta content='text/html;charset=iso-8859-1' http-equiv='content-type'/>
<meta content='en' http-equiv='content-language'/>
The most important tags are 'Title', 'Keywords', and 'Description'. Title will be shown on the top part of search engine results, keywords determine what keyword search you want your blog to be listed, and description will be below your title in the results. Where to place this codes? Well then, look for the layout section, click edit html, and paste it just below the <head> section. You can also see other blogs for example. To do this, open the blog in your browser, click 'view' tab (on top of your browser), and click 'source'(for Internet Explorer). A note pad will open showing the html code of the page you are currently viewing. Look for the meta elements just like the above for your example, if the blog owner had placed any that is.
After adding the meta elements, you are ready to submit your blog to directories, but preferably, before that, add your blog to search engines so that your blog will be crawled by their bot. Your site will be listed only after they did this. The major search engine submission url is http://www.google.com/addurl/, http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html, and http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx. Submitting to this major three is usually enough as when your site is listed in them, other search engines will start to list yours to. Sometimes it takes until 3 weeks for your blog or site to be listed, so be patient.
While waiting for your site to appear in search engine results, you can proceed to build back links to your blog. Back links is also important as it determines the ranking of your blog besides content. The higher your ranking, higher will your blog be shown in search engines results which means higher amount of visitors. To do this, you can submit your blog to blog directory, submit articles, advertise, or make reciprocal link exchange. The easiest method is to submit to blog directory as you wouldn't have to prepare anything along for the submission, you just have to submit and wait for approval, besides, there are so many free blog directories that you can submit to. Unlike article submission or advertising, you will have to prepare articles or pay an amount of fee.
After doing all this, then your blog is already on the road to success, keep updating and promoting your blog from time to time. Don't stop building back links, put your blog url anywhere you can on the net, just don't spam other peoples sites.