Those of us that blog about Second Life will find Canary Beck’s article on optimizing your blog for search engines helpful. If you have never been into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you’ll be amazed at how complex things can get. Becky doesn’t get into the complexities just the basics. And they will help.
There are tricks to getting your site placing well in Google and Yahoo. I used to do lots of SEO work before Obama and the recession. Now I do a little and sort of keep up on what Google is doing. Google continually changes how they decide what pages to show you. Web designers continually change tactics to adjust to those changes. One thing you need to know is: you DON’T TUG ON SUPERMAN’S CAPE (Jim Croce 1972 – reference). In this case meaning do NOT try to spam Google. Their retaliation is generally nuclear.
In Becky’s article she is quoting Google saying WordPress has no advantage over Blogger. That is not completely accurate. It is true Google, Blogger’s parent, shows no favor of Blogger over WordPress or visa-versa. But, they do favor well defined content, meaning in part well marked up HTML text gets points toward a ranking higher in the results list. WordPress does a better job of handling the mark up. There are plugins to improve on WordPress’ native mark up too.
There is not enough of an advantage from WP’s native mark up to be worth your time to change from Blogger to WP, IMO. But, if you are just planning a blog, plan on WP.
If you are going to target a search engine with your efforts, go for Google. Google is so far ahead of all the others, the others don’t really matter. If you get good placement in Google, you’ll likely have good placement in the other search engines too. So, focus on what Google says.