Start Blogging on WordPress Tricks

  Start Blogging on WordPress Tricks

Check your blog after making a post – always!

You need to avoid broken links, missing images, empty pages, etc., because when
the Search Engines find these, they may discontinue crawling your pages. Make
certain the title, description, and category display properly. Be prepared for
occasional blow ups. Learning what caused the problem and figuring out how to fix it
is part of the learning curve.

Pages, Categories, and Posts

Use pages to feature static content that should stay the same and in the
same place, without changing frequently. We use static pages for things like
Road Condition links and Travel Resource Information (passports and such).

Use categories to arrange your posts into logical themes within your blog.

Categorization makes it easier for both the Search Engines and humans to tell what
a post is about and to find other posts containing related information. Choose only
one category for each post, whenever practical. Putting a post in more than one
category creates duplicate content because the snippet or optional excerpt will
display on each category page that is chosen for the post. Therefore, it’s better to
set up more categories on your blog and to limit the number of categories for each
post to only one – never more than two.

Use Keywords in your post titles

Use keywords in your post titles, but don't limit your blog posts to topics that relate
to great keyword phrases. When you write your title, simply think about how you
want a searcher to find that article in the Search Engine results. If your post is about
the wide variety of widgets available, it is feasible someone would possibly search for
“widget options” to find your article.

Don't build out pages until you have content for them

The Search Engines frown upon you wasting their time and resources spidering
Under Construction pages or pages without content. So, do not create pages until
you have something worthwhile to put on them.

Theme Your Posts

Don’t just cram your keyword phrases in a post five times – think
about appropriately theming your post using synonymous and
supporting words. For example, if your post is about travel use
words like vacation, trip, expedition, adventure, and getaway in your article.
If you have good information and insight to share with your readers, you’ll find that
your posts will become naturally themed as you write them. If this isn’t happening
for you, you may need to narrow your focus on your topic.
Link out!
It helps your readers and the Search Engines. Where useful to the reader, link
from your posts to external resources. Linking to authority sites, like Wikipedia or
WordPress, using good anchor text supporting the content of your page helps to
theme it and establish relevance.

Spread the link love

Many of us who have been in the SEO biz for a while tend to want to direct and
manipulate the PageRank on our sites. However, blogs are all about linking freely,
not just to other posts and pages within your own site, but also out to other web
sites and blogs. Use the Follow plugin in our SEO Plugins section to counteract the
WordPress no-follow default.
People usually find out when you link to them, especially other bloggers. This often
prompts them to come to your blog to find out who
you are and what you said about them. They may
then link back to you and become a member of your
community. Spread your link love around and karma
may bring it back to you!

Use a blogroll

Use the blogroll feature of WordPress to point links to
other blogs on your topic you read and respect. Those
bloggers will be alerted to your interest and may
respond in kind. Inclusion of your link in the blog rolls
of others may be an indicator of blog quality to
Google.

Link Between Related Posts

Where useful to the reader, link from one post to another using good link text. This
will greatly improve the SEO of your internal linking structure.
Use one Post for One Topic
The best way to keep each post relevant to its title is to write powerful, keyword-rich
text about a single topic. If you find yourself straying off-topic, then write another
post and link to it from the original post. This will help to keep your content focused
on particular themes and make them more relevant to the Search Engines.

Use Optional Excerpts

Everyone knows that duplicate content is no good for SEO, so be certain to use the
Optional Excerpt feature built into WordPress to make your category pages unique.
Without it, category pages will contain content duplicated from the post pages in that
category.

No-Index Your Archives

Archive pages can be useful to humans in finding information on your blog. However,
these can be flagged as duplicate content, as well, since they will either duplicate
text found on either your post pages (if you do not use Optional Excerpts) or on your
category pages (if you do use Optional Excerpts).
Therefore, make your Archives pages more or less invisible to the Search Engines
by placing no index tags on them.