Hot on the heels of their SEO guide, Google have released a new round of tips aimed at bloggers. They’ve created a one page document in their help area under the category “creating a Google friendly site” to specifically help bloggers.

Whether you’re an existing blog owner, or looking to start, the guide will give you advice straight from the horse’s mouth on how to improve your site. I’ve included most of the key points below:

Create interesting and compelling content

• Write well and often. A frequently updated blog encourages people to return
• Follow Google’s webmaster guidelines, just like any site owner
• Add labels and tags to your content to make it easier to find
• Make it easy to find. Consider hosting it on your regular site, eg: www.example.com/blog
• Limit comment spam
• If you are promoting affiliate programs, make sure to add lots of valuable content

Make it easy for search engine users and spiders to find your blog

• Use descriptive titles with relevant keywords as this will help to provide search engines information about the content on your page
• Visit related blogs and participate in the discussion. Contribute to communities etc. This will also help to provide targeted backlinks to your site
• Publish a feed for your content to inform readers when its updated

Webmaster tools

• Add your blog to Google webmaster tools and verify it
• Submit a sitemap for your blog. If you publish an Atom or RSS feed, you can submit this URL as the sitemap.

There you have it! Some of these points might seem simple to more advanced bloggers, but in any case it’s great to have SEO advice directly from Google!

If you have any more advanced blogging advice, share it below!