The first session at PodCamp Western Mass that I attended was focused on SEO. I tend to avoid SEO discussions because too many of them are snake oil, but this discussion had some real good points.

As a parenthetical comment, I realize that there are a lot of things that I could do to boost the SEO of my site, but that isn’t a major focus for me.

Tish brought up the importance of making sure that when you add a comment to a blog you add the URL pointing back to your own blog. I saw that and raised it one. When you are making a comment on a system that supports OpenID, be sure to use your OpenID to point back to your blog.

People wanted to know how to do this, and it is a little complicated to explain during the discussion, so I thought I would post a brief blog post and explain how to do it.

First, you need to have an OpenID. Many of you already do. If you don’t, there are plenty of places where you can get free OpenIDs. To get a good starting place, I like to recommend claimed.com. You can create your own OpenID there and if you have multiple OpenIDs, you can link them together there. Another site I like to recommend for setting up your own OpenID account is MyOpenId.com.

However, the odds are that you may already have OpenID. Livejournal, Wordpress, Vox, AOL, Yahoo and Technorati all provide OpenID. Some of these may be good ones to use. However, if you use one of these, you will set up your blog point to your OpenID.

To do this, you need to add OpenID delegation to the meta tags to the header of your blog. As an example, if you add

<link rel="openid.server" href=http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml>
<link rel="openid.delegate" href=http://exampleuser.livejournal.com/>

This will make it so that when you use your Blog as your OpenID, it will go over to LiveJournal and check to make sure that you can log in as exampleuser.

With that, I would encourage everyone to set up OpenID delegation from their blog. Then, when you add comments one another blog, log to userid using your blog as your id. In most cases, this will leave a link back to your blog and help drive more traffic to you.