More and more women are leaving the workplace to stay home and be full time mommies. Since most households still require the income that Mommy was bringing in prior to the birth of her child, these enterprising women are coming up with ways to work at home. This allows them a chance to spend those precious first few years with their children and still help pay the bills.

Companies employ some of these moms in “telecommuting” type jobs. Others, however, are striking out on their own to earn their keep. These enterprising “Mommy Entrepreneurs” are starting cottage industries and most of them are using the world-wide-web as their storefront.

If you are a mommy with an online business, your blog can be more than just an ongoing article or story. It can become a valuable means of drawing potential customers to your website. For instance, take the case of a neighbor of mine makes custom diaper-bags. She does beautiful work, and can add a compartment for this, or embroider the child’s initials on the outside of each bag. She worked at a textile plant before “retiring” to work at home and raise her son. Her bags are beautiful and each one is made to order. Still, even with a quality product, she had trouble finding an outlet for them in our small hometown. So, she turned to the web. Her website is simple, providing shoppers with photos of her work and a price list and contact information. She has email and, for marketing purposes, she writes an ongoing blog. Marketing? Blog? Yes. Marketing and blog can be a beautiful pairing. It’s really pretty simple, and quite profitable.

If you are a mommy with a product to sell on-line and are writing a blog, make sure you include words that are in the address of your site, or in the byline it carries. In her blog, my neighbor frequently uses phrases like “diaper bag”, “customized bags” and “baby’s initials”. When someone does an online search for a “customized baby’s diaper bag with initials”, these phrases will cause the engine to pull up her site, and it will show up in the list of potentials provided for that shopper to choose from. The rest is up to her site and her skill. She is doing pretty well as of this writing, and enjoying the time she is spending teaching her son the alphabet in the process.

Using phrases that will refer customers shopping via search engines to your site has a name. It is called Search Engine Optimization. This means that you will optimize the amount of potential hits from search engines by inserting as many key phrases in the text of the blog as it will contain without being saturated to the point of becoming boring. Almost every blog on the Web has been written with SEO in mind. This makes the blog a valuable source of marketing for on-line businesses, including those businesses that are run by a mommy.

This is a guest post by Gavin

The title of your post is the 3rd most important thing you can do to make your blog SEO friendly. The first is the name of your blog and the second is the URL of your blog.

You need to make sure your blog is optimized so search engines can find it. When you do anything that helps search engines find your blog like I am going to teach below, you are using SEO techniques.

When you create a title for your post and then publish that post your blogging platform gives that post a PERMALINK. A Permalink is the permanent link to that post you just wrote.

Creating SEO Friendly Post Titles in WordPress

WordPress will allow you to write super long post titles and include lots of keywords in them and then it will turn your post title into a nice long URL that includes all of those keywords. This is one of the best built-in SEO feature WordPress offers. WordPress will also allow you to change the Permalink of a post if you decide you made a mistake or want it to be something different later on. Blogger does not allow you to change your URL. This is the only real thing that bugs me about Blogger but I have a work around (see below).

Example: what if I wrote a post with this title

How to Save Money By Clipping Grocery Store Coupons

WordPress would turn it into something like this:

http://www.nameofyourblog.com/....how-to-save-money-by-clipping-grocery-store-coupons

Do you see what WordPress did?

It kept your entire post title in that post's URL even though it was super long. It put hyphens (dashes) in between each word. This is very important because now not only does your title have keywords in it, the title matches the URL.

How to Create SEO Friendly Post Titles in Blogger

While WordPress allows you to edit your post's permalink, Blogger does not offer this feature. For this reason some thought should go into what you want for your permalink for EACH AND EVERY POST YOU WRITE because you can't change them later. The most you can do is delete the post and start over. And, once people read it you don't want to do that. Take a few extra minutes and think about how to match up your title with what Blogger is going to turn it into and it will go a long way in making your blog SEO friendly.

Blogger cuts off the title you write after 35 to 40 characters (a character is a single letter, number or space). That means that if you write a super long post title the URL will be cut off after around 40 characters. In that case just make sure the most important keywords are near the beginning.

Post Example: using the same example above

How to Save Money By Clipping Grocery Store Coupons

Blogger would turn it into:

http://www.nameofyourblog.com/...how-to-save-money-by-clipping-grocery.html

Do you see what Blogger did?

One of the most important keywords, coupons, was cut off. Those dashes that were inserted are considered part of the 35 to 40 characters because they represent the spaces you put in between the words in the title.

A better choice for title would be: How to Save Money By Clipping Coupons

Blogger Post Title Trick:

Write and rewrite

Here's what I would do in that case. I like my long post titles so I would write the title as How to Save Money By Clipping Coupons and then I would publish my post. Then I would click Edit Post and go back and change the title to How to Save Money By Clipping Grocery Store Coupons.

You see, once you publish the post the Permalink is set and now you can go back and change your title to a super long one and it won't effect the permalink.

A Winning Combination

Now your next step is to make sure you are using the same keywords in the post you write. Include the words you have put in your title like "save money", "grocery store coupons", etc.

When your post title matches the post URL (or permalink) and what you write in the post matches you have a WINNER! Now that post can easily be found on search engines because it has the winning combination.

How to I find and copy the Permalink for a particular post?

If you wanted to send someone to read that post you just wrote you wouldn't send them to your homepage. You would send them directly to the post by giving them the Permalink, or permanent link to the post.

There are two ways to find the permalink to a post.

1. Go to the public view of blog and find the post. Hover your mouse over the post title and then look at the bottom of your screen in the taskbar and you will see the permalink to the post. If you want to copy the permalink to send to someone then just right-click on the post title, and then left-click Copy.
   
   
2. On the backend of your blog where you write your posts click Edit Post. Find the post you are searching for but do not open it. Hover your mouse over the View link and then look at the bottom of your screen in the taskbar and you will see the permalink to the post. If you want to copy the permalink to send to someone then just right-click on the View link, and then left-click Copy.
   

Terms used in this article:

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization (things you do to your blog and blog posts to help your blog get found through search engines)
  
• Permalink: the permanent link to that post you just wrote
• Taskbar: the gray bar at the bottom of your browser that indicates when something is going on such as a page is loading, the URL of a page when hovered over, or if a page is Done loading
• Character: a single letter, number or space