SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization.”
Most of your quality traffic comes from search engines, so it’s important as a blogger to optimize your blog for better placement within the search engines.
I’m not going to include everything I’ve come to learn about SEO in this post, but I will include some factors that you’ll want to focus on.
Keyword research: Be sure to use keywords that users are searching for that would lead them to your blog. To find the right keyword and keyword phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as Wordtracker, Google AdWords, and Google Wonder Wheel. The more targeted your keywords are, the greater your placement in search engines will be. Use keywords in the body of your post as well as in the subject line of your posts.
Your Images: An often overlooked part of SEO is how you handle your images. Use alt tags on images. Spider bots are unable to read images. It’s important when adding images to your blog that you place information within the alt and anchor text of your images. “Seo Friendly images” is a plugin that will automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image’s alt and title tag:
Duplicate Content: Your archive pages are a major source of duplicate content. You should block those pages along with categories, search, feed and trackbacks. For a full list of what to block in your robots tx see: Robots.txt Optimization.
Another line of defense against duplication is to use the WordPress ‘more’ function.
Focus on your readership: Remember that content is king. When readers find useful information on your blog they are more likely to come back. They are also more likely to link to your content and promote it.
Correct broken links: There are a variety of ways to redirect broken links, but I have found the Redirection Plugin for WordPress to be a very effective plugin. I recently installed it on my own blog. The redirection plugin allows you to easily redirect your broken links to the correct location.
The speed of your blog: Google is about to make site speed a new ranking factor in their algorithm. With speed becoming a ranking factor Google has added a “Site performance” report under the “Labs” section of Webmaster Tools. The site performance shows you how fast your site loads compared to other sites. Google is also promoting its own application ‘Page Speed’ which really helps in optimizing your pages. GZip encoding and compression should be enabled on your blog.
Optimize your WordPress Site Titles: Make sure each page of your site has a descriptive
Related Post:
- – Blogging eBooks
– Blog Optimization- Optimizing your Blog for the Search Engines
– About
– Search Engine Optimization: Seven Common SEO Mistakes
– How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog For Search Engine Rankings
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February 5th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Hi Rose,
SEO for bloggers is a nice title to see. I’m glad to have come across a blogger who actually believes in SEO and does something about it.
Lately I’ve been coming across blogs that would minimize the importance of SEO .
I find several of your points very interesting and helpful , especially what you have to say about the source of duplicate content. Very few people have any idea about it. I only knew about the archives.
Usually people just think of using content from article directories and such as duplicate content.
Vance
.-= Vance Sova´s last blog ..Earn Money Blogging, Get Traffic Without SEO, True Or False? =-.
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February 9th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I feel you can’t stress SEO too much. For a blogger who wants to monetize, search engine traffic is incredibly important. And that’s the whole point to SEO. Bloggers need to learn what the internet marketers have known for years.
.-= ray´s last blog ..MS Office 2010 beta free download =-.
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