Today is Day 23 of the Be A Better Blogger series. We’re using the outline offered by Collis Ta’eed in an article titled 31 Days To Becoming A Better Blogger, and our topic for the day is:
Day 23. Do some SEO on your blog. SEO can be tricky, but if you know a little bit about it, set aside a day to revise and tweak your blog’s SEO. Alternately, you can take the time to learn how to optimize your blog for search engines...
I actually hosted a Free Webinar about Blog SEO recently, so those of you that participated probably have some great notes to work from. That webinar is archived in MP3 format for Elite Members too, so you can grab a copy in the Private Forum at SSWT.
Optimizing your blog is actually pretty easy - its just a matter of following a few proven steps. Once you get the hang of those steps, they become a natural part of your blogging routine.
For today's task, we'll walk through some of the basics together...
1. Set up your permalink structure to include the title of your blog posts. This not only gives you keyword-rich URL's, it also increases the click through rate when people can visibly see what to expect from the page by the URL alone.
2. Set up your Title Bars to display the most important information first. For example, on individual blog posts you want the Post Title to show up first in the Title Bar. As an example, look at the top of your screen and notice the Title Bar for this post (BABB-23: How To Optimize Your Blog).
I actually edit a file to make that happen. You can go in via FTP, or through your File Manager in your host’s control panel. You go to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder, and then into your actual theme folder. Look for the header.php file and you can edit your title bar options there.
3. Use keyword phrases in your Post Titles. The keyword phrase is a 2-4 word phrase that you want your blog post to rank well for in the major search engines. You can use WordTracker to find keyword phrases that people are looking for in searches to get ideas. This is great for brainstorming topics to blog about, or just choosing a keyword phrase to match your post idea.
If you need help with any of these steps, you can post your questions in the blogging section at the SSWT Forum.
Also see:
- Free SEO Guide for Bloggers
- Where To Use Keywords
- Social Networking For Inbound Links
- Blog Review of HeadphoneDeals.org
- Super Affiliate Blogging Interview & PDF
About Lynn Terry
Lynn,
How do I edit the header.php file to make the title of my post appear first? I tried the header space plugin but it made no difference.
Will this affect rearrange the URL of already indexed pages and influence their rankings?
Thanks
No, not at all - you are only editing the code for the Title Bars, nothing to do with the URLs. If you open the header file, you should see the code there towards the top for [title] and [/title]. Do you see it there?
Thanks - this is what I have:
» Blog Archive
How do I rearrange it?
Oops - It didnt show up here (in your comment) but I received it by email and just sent you the code 😉
I find that using my SEO skills to my blogs is like trying to sell a raincoat in Sahara. I allways consider the content to be the "king" but since I only have relatively control over the blog so many things are left outside. So thank you for these ideas...
Hi Lynn,
I remember listening to an interview you did with an RSS expert around 2005. Maybe you don't have it anymore. But he had some ideas about using Carp, a rss tool and having a separate blog whose entries you pull into your main site. Dang, can't remember his name.
Does this ring a bell?
Steve