Part two of this series deals with creating regular posts that attract visitors and are SEO friendly. (Read Part One)

Tips for Individual Blog Posts

Content is King

First and foremost – original and relevant content is KING. Write effective posts that relate your personality and offer value to the reader. Some other tips regarding content are as follows:

• Avoid duplicate content – www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com are seen as two different URL's by search engines. This can cause search engine "blacklisting" or other related issues. "Yoursite.com/default.aspx" and "yoursite.com" are also different urls and while they're the same page, they will be ranked seperately
• Less is more. Try to keep individual page content around 500 words or less. This will boost the relevancy in search engines as keywords will be found earlier in each crawl. Breaking long articles/posts into a series of posts helps with this.
• Try and place relevant keywords within the first 100 words of the post.
• Carefully consider including the published date in your posts. Some articles may get overlooked by readers as being irrelevant if they were posted several months (or even years) ago. Plus, this eliminates the issues caused when one makes updates to those posts later.
• Use whitespace effectively. Create posts that are easy to visually scan. Use of <hx> tags and bullet lists assist in this.
• Be yourself. Your blog is your personal brand. Remain professional, but give your posts an edge that shows your personality or flair.
• Be humble. While you may be trying to put forth an expert opinion, you do not want to come across as unapproachable or just a plain jerk. Say what you know. Say what you don't know. Give others credit where credit is due.
• Use images. Posts with images seem to be read more. You also get the added advantage of using the ALT attributes that get crawled by search engines.
• Be fresh – post regularly. Most experts suggest posting something new at least 3 times a week.

Link Love Rules

Link Love is a two-way street. In my opinion, the web should be a living breathing document. It was designed with the concept of linking in mind. Obviously one should link to other sites used as reference in a post A blogger should also link to other blogs or material that expounds upon the ideas in her posts. One should also read other related blogs and leave pertinent comments whenever possible. Search engines rank sites based on link love, so a healthy splattering within a blog and in other blogs' comments is important. I'm a firm believer in link karma myself. I try to link to other bloggers I enjoy whenever possible. I've found that they often return the love creating a virtual link lovefest. Remember to use balance in this practice – Google suggests keeping links on a given page fewer than 100 in number.

Don't forget other opportunities to link to your blog. Email signatures and posting Blog links on your Social Network profiles (it seems from research, the more social networking sites one belongs to – the better) often get overlooked as opportunities for linking.

Use Titles Effectively

Use keywords in blog title tags. Most blogging platforms use the post title in the title tag, so this is a no-brainer. In this case, use keywords in the actual post title.

Some HTML Tags Are Very Important

Use keywords in standard headline tags (<h1>, <h2> etc). Search engines pull keywords out of these tags. The use of the <strong> tag also indicates importance to a search crawler. Additionally, use descriptive keywords in the ALT attributes of images when possible.

Blatant Acts of Self-Promotion

Promote Your Posts

Provide for mechanisms on your blog that allow users to share your posts on other social networks such as StumbleUpon, Delicious, FriendFeed, Mixx etc. Make use of "Add This" or "Share This" widgets for each blog post.

Promote Yourself

Make sure your blog provides visitors a way to interact with you beyond leaving a comment. Create profiles on many social networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Flikr etc and provide links in your blog to those profiles. Interact on those networks. Share ideas. Share other blogs you enjoy or reference. The social aspect of the web is a huge self-marketing tool. This builds extremely valuable networks and exposes you to a plethora of industry related information enabling you to stay current. As mentioned above – put links to your blog in all your social networking profiles and in your email signatures.

These tips will help create posts that are easily to crawl and drive traffic to your blog. Read on to PART THREE of this series for tips and guidelines specifically for ASP.NET developers.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback | SEOarticles4U | Pandia SEO | WWWcoder | Google Webmaster Guidelines | Developing SEO Friendly URL's with ASP NET 2.0 | ChrisBrogan.com  |  SEOBlog