Blogging is a great tool for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Forget the technical details about pinging and how search engines read blogs a little differently (better) than regular Web pages. Blogging helps create two-way content, dialogue between you and your users and between your site and the search engines.
Static websites are a monologue. Enter into a dialogue by setting up a blog. Blogs also provide a great way for that conversation to be “SEO-friendly.” Be nice to the search engines, and they will like you and interact with your site.
WordPress Plugins
Plugins are helper applications you add on to WordPress to extend this blogging platform’s functionality. Most are free and written by the community to improve our blogging conversations.
Before publishing this blog, I installed the following Plugins for WordPress:
- Askimet plug-in to ward off comment SPAM;
- All-in-One SEO Pack to manage TITLES, META tags, etc.
- View this All-in-One SEO plugin tutorial to understand a little about the settings.
- Google Analytics for WordPress
- (We’ll share more about Google Analytics later. Think of it as a way to measure incoming and outgoing dialogues in your blog.
Shown is a screenshot showing these are “Active” for Pixel Position.
SEO with All-In-One Plugin
The TITLE tag of each blog page is one of the key SEO factors for optimizing for search engines.
TITLE: The text in the TITLE tag is text that displays in the upper blue bar of your browser, in the upper left of the browser window. This text also displays in a visitor’s bookmark of your site.
Your TITLE should reflect the content of that page. Search engines look here first to see what your blog post is “talking” about.
The All-in-One Plugin mentioned above gives you control over each page TITLE. By default, WordPress populates your TITLE tag with the “Title,” or heading, of each post You might want to be more clever with a post’s Title that shows on the page and write an optimized, keyword-rich TITLE for the search engines.
Shown is a partial screenshot of All-in-One’s options, including “Rewrite Titles.”
TIP: Your URL structure, or how your pages are named, is a setting you should review before hitting the “Publish” button. You want targeted keywords in each permanent link, aka “Permalink,” for each post. View this resource that explains about WordPress Custom Permalink Structure.
Setup Blog Plugins
Measure twice. Cut once!
Plan your blog setup before going live. A little planning to determine the basic plugins and setup for SEO will reap huge rewards down the road. Decide which plugins are a must for SEO before you launch:
Below are some plugin resources.
UPDATED 06.23.98:
Support for All-in-One SEO plugin changed. “Uberdose” ceased support of the plugin. Michael at Semper Fi Web Design is now supporting this popular plugin. Download the latest version of All-in-One SEO.
