Robert Plank

It looks like a lot of the people who comment here have their own WordPress blogs. I was recently asked by Lou Dalo:

What Do You Do to Make Your Blog Search-Engine Friendly?

If you are a marketer and you don't have even a simple blog, you are committing marketing suicide.

Reasons Why:
Product Launches, Name Recognition, Sales Momentum

Reason #1: Thanks to pinging, new blog posts get indexed in a matter of hours, not days. This means if you link from a blog post to a new product, that sales letter gets indexed quickly as well.

If you own a blog... try it! Make a post, then later in the day go to Google and type in the post title as a search phrase. I guarantee you, within 8 hours your blog post will be listed.

Reason #2: Many people will do research on a product and Google your name before they buy something. In 2004 I added Simple PHP Volume 1 into the eBookWholesaler membership site and got a flood of sales and newsletter opt-ins... even though there was no link to my site!

People Googled my name and found my site. If you have a blog and mention your products, they'll find your blog when looking for your products.

Reason #3: On your blog you have a list of all your products so people who have bought product #1 can find product #2 and product #3 and product #4. This means you get repeat sales.

Register YourName.com This Instant...
Before Someone Else Grabs It and Makes It Into A Porn Site!

I could go on and on with the reasons. If YourName.com is available, register it now and stick a simple WordPress blog on it today. I don't care if you don't have anything to put on it yet. Through all of 2007, RobertPlank.com contained nothing but my personal resume. When I was ready to write a blog, I finally did.

Who cares if your blog is brand new and only has one post on it? If you are building a list like you should be doing, it doesn't matter if you take 6 months to write another blog post because you can send a quick mailing to your list and they'll come right back.

Great, you know how important a blog is, you have a blog setup, now let's make a couple of tweaks to give you a huge advantage other the 99% of bloggers who post garbage...

There is a lot of free info about WordPress search engine optimization floating around, but some of the information is crap.

I took some of the best advice and several of my blog posts have jumped from page 2 in Google to page 1. One went from spot #5 to spot #1.

Here is EXACTLY what I did to my blog to make it search engine friendly:

SEO Tip #1: Permalinks

If you only make ONE change to your blog today, make this change.

By default, WordPress tries to link to your posts using a numeric ID which I just hate.

What you need to do is go to Options, Permalinks... then specify a Custom permalink structure with this value:

/%postname%/

They will give you special HTACCESS code to upload to your site if you haven't messed around with permalinks already.

Making that change in WordPress will make your posts look like:

http://www.example.com/your-post-title

Instead of:

http://www.example.com/?p=38

SEO Tip #2: Edit the TITLE Tag

My most effective SEO change by far was changing the code for the TITLE tag.

By default, WordPress sets your TITLE tag as: Blog Name » Post Title. You don't want that. That's what's going to appear in the search engine results! If you write a post called "SEO" you want the title to be just "SEO" ... not "Site Name » SEO."

Edit your header.php template and replace your TITLE tag with this:

<title>
<?php if (is_home()): ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>: <?php bloginfo('description') ?>
<?php elseif (is_category()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php elseif (is_date()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</title>

SEO Tip #3: Edit the META Tags

I added a meta tag inside the HEAD tag of the HTML code... again, in header.php... to prevent duplicate content penalties. This code:

<?php if ((is_home() || is_single() || is_page()) && (!is_paged())) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
}?>

... Will tell search engine robots to spider the front page, individual posts, categories, and so on... but STAY AWAY from pages where you can leave a comment... as well as categories. The contents of those pages are going to look almost exactly the same.

SEO Tip #4: Edit robots.txt

One last change I made to my blog was the robots.txt file. I told robots to stay out of the WordPress control panel and the template folders. This will make sure that the only search results for your site are REAL content pages, no junk pages.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /author
Disallow: /i/
Disallow: /f/
Disallow: /t/
Disallow: /wget/
Disallow: /httpd/
Disallow: /c/
Disallow: /j/
Disallow: /*/de/
Disallow: /*/ru/
Disallow: /*/nl/
Disallow: /*/zh/
Disallow: /*/ko/
Disallow: /*/ja/
Disallow: /*/pt/
Disallow: /*/it/
Disallow: /*/fr/
Disallow: /*/es/

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

You might want to take that last bit out if you use AdSense on your blog.

Thanks to Andy for pointing out that tips #3 and #4 can be very well managed using the meta robots plugin.

More WordPress Tips for Marketing Blogs

• Use a blog template that shows the title of the site inside the H1 tag, and the post title inside the H2 tag.
• Have your sidebar on the right side, not the left.
• Link to previous posts when possible to make sure all your pages get indexed.
• Put an opt-in form in place of where you would normally stick AdSense.
• Send an e-mail to your list when you make a blog post to get them to comment on it. See the 10-comment rule.

If you've made the above changes to your blog, go ahead and leave a comment with the URL to your blog that's now all SEO'd out.

This blog has what I call "The 10-Comment Rule."

I Post a Blog Entry, But I Don't Post Another One
Until the Original Post Gets 10 Comments.

I have the ten-comment rule because I'm just like you and have been to loser forums with tons of posts and zero replies to all of them.

On a blog, there's less focus on the replies and more on the original post, but that "empty restaurant" effect is still there.

1. Participation. If someone fills out a comment to a post of mine, they're no longer just surfing. They are now in interactive mode and are more likely to buy from me if I mention a product.
2. Search Engine Food. Search engines love lots and lots of content, and with comments, your pages can become much longer than the original post... that means more keyword matches for you and more search engine listings.
3. Intrigue. If you see lots of comments on posts you are more likely to read them, which means you spend more time on my site, which means you're more likely to see something you like.

Remember, your blogs are there to make you money. Update it and tell people about yourself, tell them what stuff you are working on and what products you have just put out. Try to work a call-to-action at the end of every blog post. Either you want to send them to a sales letter of yours, sign up to a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed.

If you are talking about someone else's blog or site, mention that in the BEGINNING of the post. Don't make that your final call to action (unless it's an affiliate link).

Don't forget to apply what you know about selling and direct response sales letters to content site and blogs:

• Try not to link out to too many sites. On the blogroll on the right side of the page, link only to your own products.
• Offsite linking includes "chicklets." Have one chicklet, i.e. "Digg this." But not: "Add to My Yahoo!" ... "Add to Reddit!" ... "Add to Bloglines" ... and so on. That's
  
• Build up a mailing list and send an e-mail to that list every time you make a new post.
• Stay away from AdSense. AdSense is for people too lazy to build a list and make a product. Believe me, that was me too at one point.

I researched how to make WordPress more optimized for search engines:

• I added meta tags to the header and made a robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content penalties.
• I changed the permalink configuration so the full URL of the post was actually revelant.
• I tweaked the template so there wouldn't be a bunch of extra text in the TITLE tag.

Got it? Your blog is just another part of your business, it's not "just for fun." It can be fun but it has a purpose:

• To present yourself as an authority figure in your niche. (BRAND YOURSELF.)
• To capture untamed search engine traffic and funnel it into a list or to your other products.
• To maintain a relationship with your list and past buyers. When you update them every once in a while, they remember who you are.

A minor side effect is that sometimes the conversation will meander off-topic and give you an idea for your next blog post.

Try your own 10-comment rule if you have a blog. My 10-comment rule works because I have a list of 10,000 subscribers (66% buyers) so you might have to make it a 5-comment rule if you have a smaller list.

Or, the ten comment rule might just mean that you can only post one blog per month. You can spend the rest of the month creating products, building up a list, and maybe advertising for your blog.

Seriously, what is the point of doing ANYTHING if no one is going to read it, or if they're going to just read it and lurk and not say anything about it?