SEO is a world of small detailed tweaks that add up to big differences in traffic, and although I am not a very detail oriented person, it’s something I’ve been trying to pay more attention to. Here are 5 tweaks that I have recently become aware of and am implementing that can make a big difference in how you rank in the search engines:
1. Head Meta Description Plugin This plugin outputs to the meta description tag a brief summary of a post’s or page’s excerpt, a category’s description when on category pages, and the blog’s tagline when on any other page or query-type. The meta description tag is the only one that really matters much these days.
2. Optimize your Title Tag – this title tag code at Daily Blog Tips will ensure that the title for each single post page is simply the title of the post.
3. Chris Pearson’s article, The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs is an excellent reference for how the tags for the headings in your blog should be set up to tell the search engines what is most important.
4. Make sure your feed isn’t showing up in Google search – do you have a robots.txt to tell it not to? The post I’ve linked to not only tells you what the correct format of your robots.txt should be, but also goes into how to submit it directly to the Google removal tool to solve the problem as quickly as possible. I had no idea this was a problem for me until it was pointed out in a helpful comment from Audi
5. To www or not www, that is the question. Enforce your domain name preference. I appreciated this post at Daily Blog Tips yesterday because I have always wondered about whether my switch from putting the www before my domain name to usually leaving it out was hurting me any. The plugin is designed to ensure that all the visitors and search bots will get redirected to the URL as you have it specified in the WordPress control panel.