If you have a small business blog, or are thinking of starting one, you should be aware of the ways you can use your blog to drive traffic to your Website. It’s simpler than you think. The first thing to understand about your blog is that each entry is counted as one Web page. Even if you have your blog set to display 10 blog posts on the same page, each of them is counted as a separate Web page by the search engines. That’s why it is important to treat each blog entry as an SEO tool. The following tips should be kept in mind for each blog entry in order to optimize them for the search engines and drive more traffic to your Website from your blog: 1. 1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword 2. 2. Make sure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning 3. 3. Use subheads with or tags that also use your keyword 4. 4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts 5. 5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword 6. 6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize certain keywords and phrases 7. 7. Be sure to ping the directories 8. 8. Include tags for all of your blog entries 9. 9. Use categories effectively 10. 10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your Website Because each blog entry is a separate Web page, the search engines will crawl them and index them just as they do your Web pages. Optimize each one heavily around a specific keyword related to your Website and that’s an extra doorway into your Website for each page indexed at the search engines. Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal Web pages of your Website you are improving the SEO effect of your blog entry. A poll of top SEO experts by SEOmoz revealed that a majority of those SEO experts said these type of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking Web pages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text. You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. Those tags will be used by the search engines to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it and this makes it easier to share among their social group. If you want to learn about writing blogs and earn money at the same time, read articles about making money blogging or even making money blogs. You can interchange the keywords, it’s actually up to you.