• Establish you as an authority in your niche.
• Send traffic to your blog when the carnival is posted.
• Create lots of valuable one-way links to your blog.

A lot of bloggers are not familiar with blog carnivals, or may believe that they are not useful. Although blog carnivals may not result in massive traffic that crashes your server, I have found that they are simple and reliable sources of incoming links to my blog. And sometimes, they send hundreds of new visitors to my blog in a very short timeframe.

You can learn about blog carnivals at http://www.BlogCarnival.com/ and look at a recent edition of my book marketing blog carnival.

There are carnivals on nearly every subject, and you will find them listed at BlogCarnival.com. To participate, just find one that is a good match to your blog content, then fill out the online form to submit a link to a recent blog post.

Only submit your best posts to blog carnivals. This will be many readers’ introduction to you, so make a good impression with quality content. Also, only submit to carnivals on your topic. A parenting carnival is probably not interested in your blog post about Search Engine Optimization.

The blogger hosting the carnival selects the posts that will appear from the submissions received.
Some publish every submission they receive, and others receive so many submissions that they can not use them all.

On the day of the carnival, the blogger posts links to all of the selected posts, sometimes with commentary, sometimes not. Some carnivals “travel” from site to site. If you would like to host an edition of a carnival, let the organizer know. The host usually chooses the posts that will be included in that edition, and posts the carnival to their blog on the scheduled date. Specifics depend on the carnival.

Hosting a blog carnival can get your blog a lot of exposure. You can even organize your own carnival. There is information on the BlogCarnival.com site about how to register your blog carnival. It is free, and takes relatively little time.

What do I mean by ‘evergreen content’? Evergreen content does not go out of date and does not change. If you write about breaking news or the hottest new technology, those posts may be very popular for a while, but they will soon become dated. On the other hand, if you write about how to knit or you compile historical or reference information, it will not go out of date. Anything that does not change substantially over time could be considered evergreen.

You may wish to include a mix of timely and evergreen posts on your blog. Having timely posts can bring traffic when you write about a hot new topic, but including a number of evergreen posts will bring visitors for years to come. When I look at my web site stats, I find that some of the most-visited pages are articles I wrote and published years ago.

Even though evergreen content stays ‘fresh’ for many years, it may be seasonal. Consider the example of a gardening blog. The topic of gardening is evergreen. Plants have been growing pretty much the same way for a long time now, and they will continue to do so. However, the topics that bring the most search traffic to your site and the pages that get the most views will depend on the season. Gardeners are thinking about different things in the spring than they are in the fall, and your traffic patterns will reflect that.

You can add evergreen posts to your blog by writing about tips, how-to and other advice that remains constant. Essays and opinion pieces are often evergreen, too.

Keep your content evergreen by making updates when appropriate. For example, if you link to specific vendors or other resources, those pages may disappear from the Internet over time. Check for broken links and repair, replace or remove them to make sure your posts are still useful. You may be able to do this with the software you use to create your web site, or you can use one of the free link checkers available online. Just search for ‘check for broken links’ and you will find several options.

That last example is another way to keep your content evergreen: Instead of giving a link to a specific page or resource, suggest how readers can find a current resource themselves. That way, if the resource you were going to suggest goes away, or a better one comes along, readers will not be left with broken links and no resources. (You would be surprised how many people do not know how to properly search for things. Giving them search terms helps.)

Another way to keep your blog evergreen is to do away with dates on your blog posts. This may be a little controversial in some quarters; however, why draw attention to the fact a post is months (or even years) old? This may be especially important if you reach a point where you are not updating your blog as frequently as you once did. Someone may arrive at your home page, see that the most recent post was three months ago, and leave without discovering all of the useful content available.

Making your blog content relevant for years to come will make your blog more useful to visitors and more profitable for you.

According to comScore, of the five major search engines, Google accounted for 63.1% of the searches conducted in October, 2008. That is more than three times the number of searches at Yahoo!, the second-ranked search engine. That means that most most SEO is aimed at Google, because a high ranking in Google can deliver lots of qualified visitors to your site. Of course, other search engines use criteria that are similar to Google’s, so if  you rank well in one, you may rank well in others, too.

Fortunately, Google wants to help us help them index our sites. Although they are quite protective of the inner-workings of the ranking process, they do provide clues that can make indexing by Google easier and more thorough, which may elevate your site’s rankings.

Here area few of my favorite Google resources to help you optimize your site:

Google Webmaster Central Blog
An official Google blog that has lots of tips, advice and tutorials on what you need to know about how Google indexes sites.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF)
Want a simple guide to SEO, in easy to understand language? This guide is it. Many of the best practices described in this short guide are easy enough (and non-technical enough) for even the newest Internet newbie to understand and implement. The guide is also available in Spanish.

Matt Cutts’ Blog
Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and his blog sometimes addresses topics of interest to those who wish to rank well in Google. Matt points out in his disclaimer that this is his personal blog and does not represent Google’s official policy, but his blog can be a good place to get insight into what is happening with Google Search. You can jump right to the Google/SEO posts but the blog also has lots of interesting info on tech topics and more.

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