One factor of the long term success of a blog is the ability of people to find your blog in situations where they are looking around on the web for topics you’re writing about. So what I’m talking about is the visibility of your blog to search engines, related blogs and other services that aggregate information from around the web. Here are a few tips that can increase the visibility of your blog.

1. Make sure that you’ve got your rss feed auto-discovery set correctly. Check my previous post to get details on what this means. In short, the most popular web browsers and a growing number of online services can help people to easily find and subscribe to your RSS feed if this is set up properly.
2. Make sure that your post and page urls are clean. Which link do you think gives you more visibility; http://blog.awakenedvoice.com/?p=506 or http://blog.awakenedvoice.com/2007/11/02/the-importance-of-
   rss-feed-autodiscovery/? Both point to the same place but having a link that displays the full title increases your visibility to search engines.
3. Ping blog search services. Check this year old post titled Ping Ping Ping. If you let blog search services by Google, Technorati and others know you’ve published a post then people will be able to find you’re new content right away.
4. Publish a list of related blogs (or blogs you read and like) on your site. Geeks like me call this a blogroll. Some blogging tools, especially WordPress, will show you other blogs that are linking to you. So when you link to other blogs they then have a greater chance of finding you. If your blog relates or provides good content then those bloggers just might reciprocate with a link on their site.
5. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google. Google has this thing called Webmaster Tools which can be very valuable to people who run a website. It basically will show you how Google views your site. Has your site been indexed? Do you have dead links on your site? Which search queries are sending traffic to your site? This is geeky stuff but can be very helpful in providing you with a full picture of your visibility to the world’s most popular search engine. Some blog tools, like WordPress and Drupal have add ons available that make this process a snap.

I hope that you find this short list of geeky ways to increase your blog visibility helpful. Anyone who has additional ideas is welcome to submit them in the comments.