16 Ways to SEO Optimize your Blog
In this and the next post, we’ll outline some useful tips for maximizing your blog’s potential for your visitors and for the search engines.
PART 1 - Blog Setup
1. Be master of your own domain
Install a blog on your domain name – DO NOT use blogger.com unless you have no other option. Add it into your primary navigation as “Our Blog” or similar. Don’t use, “Our Articles” or “The Journal” because you are trying too hard to be clever.
2. Be unique!
Use a unique design—download a free WordPress theme and adjust it to your brand. It’s worth paying a designer to get a unique look so you can “stand out from the crowd.”
3. Feedburner
Use Feedburner to manage the delivery and to see stats. Add their Feed Flares to add easy links under each article for Digg, del.icio.us or Email to a Friend among others. Make it easy for people to spread your information for you.
4. RSS feeds
Add RSS Feeds in an obvious place using the orange icon so people can subscribe to your feed with one click. Make it easy for people to keep track of your headlines. If you use Feedburner currently, have a look at their new MyBrand option which allows you to host your own feeds for a seamless user experience.
5. Consolidate your RSS feeds
FeedButton offers a service that allows you to offer multiple RSS aggregator and feed reader buttons with a single expanding rollover button. See it in action here.
6. Technorati
Claim your blog at Technorati and use Technorati tags. Update your blog’s visibility in WordPress under Options/Privacy.
7. Ping!
When you add a new blog entry, you might want to ping site such as Technorati and FeedBurner to let them know you have a brand new blog entry on your site. You can also now ping Google’s Blog Search as well for faster indexing in their blog search engine. You can set up pinging in WordPress in Options/Writing/Update Services.
8. Manage the comments
Only allow comments if you are 110% sure you want people to do this. You should manage this in WordPress under Options/Discussion. There is the danger that you’ll get inundated with spam—you don’t want Google or Yahoo! to find masses of spammy links on your site to all manner of less-than-quality sites submitted to your blog by a blog spammer.
9. Use a sensible URL structure
Don’t use “permalinks†such as www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123 . Instead, use www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_here. WordPress allows you to easily adjust this in Options/Permalinks.
10. What’s next?
Add “next” and “previous” post buttons.
11. Top 10
Add a “Top Ten Posts” feature to display most popular posts. Integrate this onto every page on your Web site using a server-side include (the site pages must have the .php suffix).
12. Posts via email
Offer posts via email as some people just don’t get RSS. So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.
13. Related Posts
Add a “Related Posts” feature using the “Contextual Related Posts” (zip file) plugin for WordPress.
14. Tags
Add tag clouds and tag pages—check out “Ultimate Tag Warrior” plugin for creating these.
15. Keep widgets to a minimum
You can add some cool ones to your blog such as MyBlogLog or a Flickr photo box tied to your photo gallery. But be aware that having a large number of these (JavaScript) can seriously slow down your site.
16. Keep your blog software up-to-date
WordPress are constantly updating their software so keep an eye on which version you have then follow the installation instructions.
Next month, we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of how to write compelling articles and how to get the word out
