Growing Your Blog to the Next Level With SEO

[Linda Buquet]

Good info from ProBlogger

How to Grow Your Blog to the Next Level With SEO

"While SEO is something that is well worth while focusing upon right from the start of your blog - I’ve found that it becomes particularly important once your blog is at least a few months old. In my experience it is not until a blog is 6 to 12 months old that it really begins to grow in its authority in Google.

I will not rehash everything I know about SEO here (I’ll link to some resources at the bottom of this post) but here are just two tasks that I think established bloggers will particularly want to focus upon (I’m assuming that you’ve got some of the basics like getting titles set up right):"

[Nelle]

I really enjoyed this article. One of the responders made a comment that I've never considered and I'm concerned that I might have chosen the wrong wordpress theme. The comment was

"However, if you want a shot at GREAT rankings, you really need to look at the theme you use. The wrong theme, not optimized for easy SE crawling, is not going to help you. In fact, it can hurt you"

How do I know if my theme is optimized for proper SE crawling? Boy you learn something new everyday ... I'll have some serious research to do tomorrow!

[Linda Buquet]

Does the URL of your post have a number like: yourblog.com/?12784 or is it more like yourblog.com/your-keyword-title.html

Here is a Wordpress plugin if your blog isn't optimized, that could help.
All in One SEO Pack

Some features:

* Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
* Generates META tags automatically
* Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs

[Nelle]

Okay, my post url's are keywords not numbers. I've got meta tags sorted out. I'll have to check on duplicate content. I'm not sure what you mean by that and how it specifically relates to wordpress. (Something else to put on my research list!)

I just finished watching a Matt Cutts presentation for the last hour. Really validating. I took some journalism classes last year to beef up my writing skills. It seems that writing news and writing effective seo posts are very similar exercises in Matt Cutts' mind.

[seo-affiliate]

I think the comment was a bit misguided. As Linda pointed out with the URL (Permalink structure), many of the SEO Enhancements are configured in the admin console and the theme doesn't have too much to do with the URL structure.

Using an SEO plugin is helpful as it allows you to tweak the Titles and Meta tags.

Making sure that you have the site set up to auto-ping and listing ping services also helps with getting the blog noticed.

Best,

Anthony

[Rob_TID]

Look up the Yoast Wordpress SEO guide for the most comprehensive, *** kicking seo guide to wordpress available.

[Nelle]

Yes I agree Yoast is amazing. I found one of his presentations at problogger. And took notes furioously. I have already downloaded some of his plugins.

I particularly found his comments about sticky posts on category and tag pages interesting.

[freexml]

Originally Posted by Nelle

I have already downloaded some of his plugins.

seems that his recommended firefox plugins don't support the latest firefox editions.