Following his keynote, John Battelle returned for a panel with Tris Hussey and Dave Taylor on Blogging and SEO Strategies.

Dave Taylor kicked off the the presentation with some tips:

• Keyword research pays dividends. Use tools like WordTracker, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Google AdWords.
• Keyword density: Be sure to use your keyword periodically (although not unnaturally frequently) in a post.
• The Secret to inbound links? The way to get inbound links is to give outbound links.

SEO Best Practices.

• Good titles. The headline of the entry should also be the title in your browser window. Put the title of the individual entry first ahead of the blog name.
• Good headlines: Make them active and catchy.
• Reasonable Keyword Density
• Occasionally emphasize a keyword with bold or italics. This will reinforce the importance of that word or phrase.
• Good category names. Do keyword research on your category names to find terms that people look for most often.

A great place to learn how to do this is on Google’s Webmaster Central.

Is it worthwhile to include keywords in URLs? Notice that when you do a search, if the term is located in the URL it will be highlighted.

Two useful tests to determine that you are showing up in search engines is to type into the google search bar “site:[your domain]” and “link:[your domain]“.

Persistence is also a virtue from the perspective of the search engines. So, when beginning a new blog, recognize that you must blog for a sustained period of time before the search engines will start to rank you.

By installing code from HitTail, you can track the keywords that people search in coming to your page.