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.
