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Okay, I’ve finally alotted some time to get my blog back on track. For those of you not familiar with this site, I used to have a quite splendid blog — long story short, I have this now. It made me so mad I left it like this for about two months. Hey, sometimes you just need a bit to cool off, right? Anyway I thought what better post to start with than the the exact process that I use to SEO my blog from the start.
Permalink Structure
There seems to be quite a debate over the best permalink structure for your wordpress blog. There is however, one general consensus — whatever you pick, stick with it. It is a pain in the ass to change your permalinks because your inbound link then become broken. Traffic referred from Google will come to a screeching halt for a couple of weeks until you get it cleared.
As you may have noticed, I’ve simply chosen to go with the following permalink structure:
/%postname%/
A lot of people suggest using /%category%/%postname%/ as your permalink structure. I tend to disagree with this as just the simple fact of changing/deleting a category will invalidate the inbound link. Structure. www.domain.com/post-name goes for sheer seo-age — something that happens to work well for my purposes online. How about you?
Title Structure
As you may know, titles are very important in SEO. Optimizing your title structure is a must for any new blog — or old blog for that matter. You want to have the title of your post appear first, followed by a permanent identifier. In my case the permanent identifier I chose is Promoted Profits. I used the following code suggested by Finton Darragh to achieve the title structure you’ll find on my blog:
<title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ · ‘; } ?>Promoted Profits</title>
There are a lot more general SEO strategies that I won’t get into here because they don’t specifically relate to Wordrpess SEO. Finton’s gone into a little more detail in his Wordpress SEO post.
Wordpress Plugins
WWSGD - What would Seth Godin do plugin. If you’re new here you may have noticed the nice message above this post — "If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!" — This is controlled by cookies and will disappear by your third visit. Hopefully you click the subscribe link before then because I’ve got some killer tips to share with you.. Anyway, you get the idea of that plugin. It’s not so much for SEO as continued readership — either way it accomplishes a similar goal.
Optimized Title - If you follow the title structure I suggested above you don’t need this plugin. However, if you’re not comfortable editing the code you may want to look into it. It basically does the same thing, except in point-and-click form. Hey, I’m not saying nothing.
Tag Warrior - I haven’t done much yet with this plugin, but if you are [tag]blogging[/tag] there’s no real reason you shouldn’t be using it. This plugin has endless possibilities, and helps your readers find relevant content more easily. When I implement it fully into my blog, I’ll write a whole post on it.
Some others:
PHP Exec - Allows you to place php in your posts
Print It - Readers can print your post with a click
Basically there is a Wordpress plugin for everything. If you look hard enough you can find some real gems on wp-plugin.net.
Setting up your blog can be tiring, which is the problem I’m experiencing right now. I’ll update this later when I get some rest and finish my setup.
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Hey!…Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts comin..holy Wednesday
Nice post. One thing I have noticed is that SEO is a continuous process. It
cannot be done perfectly in one shot. You have to be on your toes and try out
different things to get ahead of your competitors. There have been instances
where my site’s search engines rankings have improved considerably with few
small tweakings.
- Michael
Hi Micheal,
Thanks bud. Yea, you are right about that - There are however, certain strategies that have been pretty solid for a while and I thinks it’s best to start with the basics. It’s funny I didn’t intend it, but there’s been several occasions where I’m setting up a wordress blog and refer back to this post, so I think a lot of this stuff has stood up for a while.
Cheers,
Bryan
I’ve found a set of tools that can help you to spy on your competition and guarantee a top ranked site in all the major search engines. I’m even giving away a free eBook “SEO MADE EASY”. Just for stopping by. URL Removed by Admin
Note to commentor:
I removed your URL because your comment provided nothing of complementary value to the above blog post. I’m usually happy to give you a link if you provide a thoughtful, insightful comment concerning the article, but blatant self promotion will not be tolerated on this blog. But thanks for stopping by.
Cheers,
Bryan
I wish there were a way around it - but backlinks are important. I recently found this Social Media Strategy software to make the getting of them really easy.. On web 2.0 sites. A process that normally gobbles up huge amounts of time. Have a look at it and see what you think.
Similar to SEO novices, some professional SEO’s still research and contact webmasters of relevant websites one-by-one to ask for a link exchange. This is frequently a slow, inefficient process that likely will achieve underwhelming results and can even subject the SEO to spam complaints.