SEO > 3 Tips on Making Your Wordpress Blogs More Search Engine Optimized

Search Engines love blogs.

Why?

Because legit bloggers (not splogs or spam blogs) are always creating and adding content to their sites and search engines will come and spider you if you do the right things.

What are the “right things?”

Well, think “keywords and key phrases.”

If you are doing a personal blog, or journal, not advertising a business, product or service, then this will not be a big deal to you.

But if you are blogging to make sales, promote products, build lists, and earn adsense or yahoo revenue, and want the search engines to visit know about you everyday, then this is very key for you.

See my blog so you can see how it relates in this post.

See how I titled my blog. It’s all about me. Jeff Mills is now a good keyword that gets traffic, and Jeff Mills from Detriot, my brother from a different mother gets a ton of traffic from the urban hipity hopity crowd who love his dope beats and funky rhymes. But I am not that person. But anyways, the title tags you use in your blog are really key. And Jeff probably gets my traffic from people looking for me. And I am sure I get some of his traffic from people looking for him, but find me instead.

I am not complaining about free trafffic and that is the whole point.

The title of your blog in wordpress, needs to be search engine optimized as well.

The titles of your posts are key for SEO friendly links.

The titles of your post slugs and catagories are important as well.

The # of sites, linking back to your blog is key and makes you look like the expert in your niche. So keyword phrases and link backs to your blogs off other people’s sites are nice. Ask for links from your friends who have high google page ranks.

Did you also know, that submiting a google friendly sitemap.xml file makes your site spider food friendly too?

How did I learn all this, when I only started blogging 3 weeks ago? I learned it like so many of us do… the hardway.

See, let me share with your 3 free tips and tools here to help you make your wordpress blogs WAY more spider food for the big search engines.

1. Use a Google Sitemap XML creator and submitter plug in. Just go to the site, follow instuctions and install the plugin in the plugin directory. http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final .

2. Optimal Title Plugin. Use the plugin that make your posts more search engine friendly. I use this one called Optimal Title. See: http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/.

Here is what it would look like in the search engines when I posted, using the standard method that comes in word press with no modications, on my last post on teleseminar secrets:

Jeff Mills’ Blog | JeffMills.com | Home Based Business Entrepreneur | Work At Home Tools >>Teleseminar Secrets, the one Tool I Use to Make Over $500,000 from Home

So, as the search engines would spider that link what would show up? My blog title first. Most of it would be cut off since the amount of characters is too long for standard title tags for websites. The Search engines would post a good description talking about the subject of my post, problem was my titles did not match. There was a disconnect.

How I found this out is one person called me cause he found out I was promoting the Mortgage Accelerator program and saw it in the Search Engines, and clicked, but could not find the specific post in my blog.

So, once I properly installed the code from Optimal Title into my theme’s header.php file (yours might be in the index.php file of your theme), all the sudden, now my post titles are WAY more search engine friendly, as the post now begins with very search engine friendly words and phrases, and puts the real title of my blog AFTER the post title.

Make sense? If not, click on any posts titles on my blog, then look where the title shows up in the upper left corner of your browser.

It will take you to a single post page where you are reading this post all by itself. If you look in the upper left corner of your IE browser, you’ll see the post title tag as it will appear in the search engines there.

Here is now how the modified title tag shows this post now:

Teleseminar Secrets, the one Tool I Use to Make Over $500,000 from Home >> Jeff Mills’ Blog | JeffMills.com | Home Based Business Entrepreneur | Work At Home Tools

3. Post Slugs I did not what these were 5 days ago. But it makes your blog post title shorter and more SEO friendly.

If my post title was:

13 Reasons why you need to sign up and save 70% off your home mortgage interest in 7-11 years

it would show up as:

http://www.jeffmills.com/13-Reasons-why-you-need-to-sign-up-and-save-70%25-off-your-home-mortgage-interest-in-7-11-years.htm (not a real link)

But that looks ugly and is too long.

So, in the post slug box, which is shown where you write your blog posts, I could put these words: save-70%-off-Mortgage-Interest.htm and that would shorten the link considerably, and yet, still retain some great keywords and search engine optimized content.

So, I tried to be very clear here how this all works, for newbies, it will be confusing, for others, enlightening and for others, you’ll go, “huh?”

No worries, I hope you enjoy the tips and put them to use on your sites, as I am sure I will discover more SEO tricks as I learn more about blogging. If you need help with wordpress blogs or plugins, there are many communities which can help you. Just search online.