DMBMMLF Day 3 – Basic SEO

Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog.

I’m realizing that the tagline for this series isn’t exactly honest. True, I’m doing this all in ten days and if you follow all the recommendations you’ll have one great blog.

But each day has more like 4-6 small actions. So for that I apologize, but the tagline’s staying. I’m giving you all this information but the assignments only have one action – the most important one (at least, in my opinion).

Feel free to do it all, only complete one. or heck, be a rebel and ignore my advice completely!

Onward!

I’m sure you’ve heard of SEO – it’s short for Search Engine Optimization.

It’s making your site easy for search engine bots to index and writing good content that relates to what your blog is about.

You know those guys who send you emails out of the blue claiming they can get you in the top spots on Google for thousands of dollars?

You don’t need ‘em.

Really. With a decently optimized WordPress theme (I’ll list some later), a few tweaks to your site, and good targeted content, you too can rank highly on Google and other search engines.

My own site, WPChick was up only a couple of months and I’ve ranked as high as #2 on Google for “WordPress Coaching.” Granted, one of the reasons is that there’s not all that much competition for those keywords right now, it does show you that a few simple things can definitely improve your standing.

Your Theme

First of all you need to make sure your WordPress theme is not causing any problems.

A clean, well-coded theme will give the search engine crawlers an easier time getting through your content. Try to choose a theme that says “SEO-Friendly” or “SEO-Optimized.” There’s really no guarantee these themes actually ARE what they say, but your chances are good.

Or stick with proven paid themes like Headway, Frugal, Vigilance or Thesis. 

Make sure you enter a descriptive Blog Title (your name, VERY short blurb about what you do) and a tagline under Settings > General in your WordPress Admin. Your META tags (title & description) will reflect whatever’s in these two fields.

If you need more control over your theme’s defaults, consider the All-in-One SEO plugin. This will allow you to fine-tune all the META information on your main page, each blog post and each page.

Links

Link your site everywhere and get others to link to you. 

Create internal links. These are links to other pages on your site within your posts and pages.

And most of all, link to other relevant sites in your posts and pages.

And for the love of chocolate-chip cookie dough don’t abuse this!

Don’t beg complete strangers for links. Don’t use stupid link-generating “systems.”

The key here is “organic.” Ask friends, family members, associates, anyone/where you have a relationship with folks for links to your site.

And reciprocate. 

Be a good Netizen (Sorry. I hate that word, too).

Permalinks

How easy is this to read?

http://yoursitename.com/?p=118

It doesn’t say much about what may be on the page. Funny thing is, the search engine bots can’t really do much with that either. It’s a number. Numbers don’t really correlate to any meaningful search terms that will help you with your SEO.

So WordPress has a built-in feature called “Permalinks.” You can tell it to re-write the structure of your permanent links so they look something like:

http://yoursite.com/wordpress-rocks-harder-than-ac-dc/

See the keywords? You have WordPress & AC/DC in your URL. And if your post has those repeated a few times (in moderation and in context!! keyword stuffing is a no-no), you’re good to go.

If you already have lots of posts on your blog, changing your Permalinks will make it a bit difficult for people who have linked to specific posts before. That URL (http://yoursitename.com/?p=118) will no longer be accessible. 

So make sure you install a plugin like Permalinks Migration to handle the Permalink structure change.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are handy little things. They’re a place where all the pages of your site are listed and linked.

Excellent for search engine bots/crawlers/spiders since they can go to one page and see every single page listed.

Use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a bot-readable XML file (eXtensible Markup Language – just another coding language that handles structured information like a blog post).

Then sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account, verify your blog (requires a bit of coding or FTP access) and submit your Sitemap. This will help your site get indexed quickly and make sure that all your pages are indexed.

Google Webmaster Tools is also handy for analyzing your site. See this comprehensive guide for the other features and reports if you’re interested.

Your assignment for today: Check on your Blog Title and Tagline in the  Settings > General screen in your Admin. Make sure they’re short, but descriptive and include the keywords you want to target.

If you’re feeling adventurous, install the All-In-One SEO plugin and see how much control you can have over the META tags on your blog and each individual post and page.

If you’re feeling absolutely nuts, take on all the above recommendations.

As before, let me know how you’re doing!

P.S. I know it’s a lot to absorb. That’s why at the end of the 10 days, I’ll make this all available as an e-Book (with more in-depth how-tos and step-by-step instructions!) so you can work through it at your own pace.

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This post is part of the Does My Blog Make Me Look Fat: Ten Days. Ten Small Actions. One Great Blog Series. Here are the rest:
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