Paul Stamatiou recently posted on search engine optimization 101. He talks about some basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and how he used them on his blog to improve his traffic. A lot of bloggers don’t care about SEO, most likely because it has a bad reputation. Well, SEO doesn’t have to be shady; it can actually be a very important factor when it comes to maximizing the traffic to your blog. And of course, what blogger doesn’t love more traffic?

I haven’t been linked by any major sites today and am already at 2,300 unique which is unusually high for this time (4pm). If this trend continues I might beat my own record for traffic last month; 138k page views and 74k unique.

A bloggers primary focus is to write good content for their readers. In many cases you want to increase your readership, which can be done through many different means. One of these is through getting traffic from search engines. You may be already getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other major search engine, but have you optimized your blog to maximize your search engine traffic?
Here are the most common mistakes that I see on blogs:
1. Most blogs do not have meta description tags. You can find a plugin for your blogging platform that will easily add it to each post. You can setup the meta description tag to automatically pull the first sentence from your blog post.
2. The URL strings on many blogs are dynamic instead of static. You do not want extraneous characters in your blog.

http://www.pronetadvertising.com/looking%20forward?to@!the231lit.html

You want clean URLs like this

http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/looking-forward-to-the-little-man.html
3. Most blogs state their name in the title tag and then the title of the post.

PaulStamatiou.com – Search Engine Optimization 101

The two should be reversed.

Search Engine Optimization 101 – PaulStamatiou.com
These tips might increase your search engine traffic slight or more drastically depending on a whole lot of other factors, but when you are trying to increase your readership, every little bit of traffic counts. Give them a try on your blog, you don’t have much to lose.