The Blog – SEO Equation

It goes without saying that search engine optimization is just as important for blogs as it is for websites. However, fortunately, blogs integrate software that pings search engines to inform them of new content, and consequently, blogs are usually crawled a lot more often than a static site.

In this section, we’ll discuss some of the important considerations you must make when choosing a blog platform for SEO and tools that will make SEO much easier. You’ll also learn a little more about how to create content that is SEO friendly, especially with regards to keyword research.

When you are considering SEO for blogs, you’ll need to think of employing numerous on-site techniques so that search engines can discover your content. The critical piece is keyword-rich content. Beyond that, make some considerations for:

Usability and ease of navigation: Make it easy for your readers to access the various parts of your page without difficulty. Be sure to add important information in visible areas. One mistake often seen with blogs and blog designs is the lack of a “Previous Posts” or “Next Posts” link on the bottom of the page. It makes sense to flesh out all these details as soon as possible.

Regular content updates: Search engines crawl websites more often if they are frequently updated. Content updates are user-friendly as well – readers have a reason to keep returning to the site.

Creation of XML sitemaps for search engines (and HTML sitemaps for user navigation): An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of URLs that informs search engines when new content becomes available. You can also put numeric values to indicate weight/priority on specific content. When content gets updated, your XML file is updated. As long as you register your sitemap with the various search engines, the search engine spiders will discover new content by looking at your sitemap file. Adding an XML sitemap is usually easy with numerous plugins available for blog platforms.

Duplicate content: Your category pages may have the same exact content as your monthly archives. If this is the case, be sure to employ rules (such as in robots.txt) to filter out the duplicate content. For example, in the case of WordPress, you may want to add rules to disallow crawling of category page. This ensures that search engines find the proper page (typically the main page) and crawls that (and indexes it) instead.

Linking (both internally and externally): Link to your important pages internally, and use appropriate anchor text to direct your readers (and search engines) to content that you feel is important. Link externally to diversify your content and link to other recommended sources for information. For example, if you are talking about search engine optimization and have a page dedicated to SEO on your site, you may want to link to your SEO page (internal linking). But if you want to talk about social media marketing and don’t have a relevant page on your site, you might want to point your readers to a better authority source on another website (external linking). Also, when employing linking techniques, use appropriate and descriptive anchor text, not “click here” to pass the best link value to these pages.

Choosing a name that is easy to remember: Like any website or brand name, your blog should not be difficult to remember - Keep it simple.

SEO Plugin Options for Bloggers

Since WordPress is by far the most prolific blog platform with plugin support, this section will discuss a number of WordPress plugins available for making SEO easy.

All in One SEO Pack: If you have to choose one plugin for WordPress to use, this is the one you need. The All in One SEO Pack gives publishers the ability to customize the title tag (and make it different from the actual post title) and to add meta tags to individual posts and the blog’s homepage itself.

Google XML Sitemap: This plugin gives you the ability to create a sitemap that is search-engine friendly. When a blog post is published, it also automatically notifies search engines of changes via pinging. As soon as you publish a new post, the XML sitemap gets updated.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: You already have a sitemap for search engines, but what about for visitors? Dagon Design’s sitemap generator is a fully customizable sitemap generator that you can add on a single page for ease of navigation for those human readers. It also allows you to view the number of comments your blog posts have received at a glance.

Objection Redirection: Making a big page structure overhaul? Use this plugin to redirect pages without having to edit your .htaccess file.

WP Super Cache: If your server is stressed under an intensive load of concurrent database connections, WP Super Cache kicks in to serve static HTML files without processing the heavy PHP scripts. While this is may suffice as a viable solution and will keep your website up during a traffic spike, your hosting environment may still have problems with this setup, so stress testing is absolutely imperative.

Disqus: If you don’t want to manage comments yourself, the Disqus comments plugin is a social community that also serves as a WordPress plugin.

WordPress has thousands of plugins available, and many of them support additional features, including analytics, social integration, and more. The official WordPress plugin directory can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

Note: Upon starting a new WordPress blog, be sure to set up the permalink structure appropriately. By default, your URL may be something to the effect of www.mydomain.com/?p=302. Change this as soon as you get started to reflect a keyword-rich URL structure and to employ slugs rather than post IDs within the URL.

Have fun out there, and as always, we’re here when you need help!
Best, The Savy Agency