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.
Our parallel brains are sync-ed again! I just implemented the SEO title tag plugin today
http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/
I am definitely going to look in to your other suggestions just to make sure I haven’t missed anything.
[...] If you aren’t in the mood for a plug-in, Daily Blog Tips has instructions on creating an optimal title tag – complete with the code. I found this by way of Randa’s post 5 SEO Enhancements for Your Blog. [...]
Thanks for this Randa.
I’ll be checking a couple of these out for sure.
Hi Randa, thanks for the list. I didn’t know about the head meta description plugin one. It’ll help to keep pages as unique as possible.
Thats a great list of resources. I had never seen Pearsons site before. Thanks.
Great list. I didn’t know about the robots.txt so thanks, I’ll apply that to my blog.
Chris Pearson’s post there is excellent. I’ve always tried to keep to the exact validation stuff, but its really a good idea to take into consideration how you use your h1, h2, h3 tags and so on.
Ohhh! Also, don’t forget site-maps. This WP plugin is great:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
Thanks Randa for the generous Link on the post
Making more analysis, I found a more serious problem! Your archive pages such as
randaclay.com/archives/too-much-information
randaclay.com/archives/pmetrics-a-review
are listed on the google index, but when you click on them, they return a 404 Error! I suggest you remove them as well or fix them, since returning lots of pages with 404 to Google is not very good
Ugh… thanks Audi. I’m not sure how that happened, but I appreciate the heads up.
@Lara -yeah, I’m thinking about switching to that site map generator for my Site Map page, and use Clean Archives in another way. Thanks for pointing to that one.
Another good tip is to robot.txt your categories and archives to stop any duplicate content. Also when Wordress rewrites with mod_rewrite it may create dupe content again. You can sort this out by robot.txt anything with a question mark after it.
Some great advice there. Specially like the bit about roboting out your feed
It is great to see these 5 suggestions as they are easily the most common suggestions made to webmasters at Google’s Webmaster Tools Help forum.
Cornwall SEO’s suggestions about special treatment for category and archive listings is VERY important as well. Some would say that the “duplicate” content is penalized but that is not really the case. The problem is more one of pages getting indexed that will never show up in search results taking up space that could be better used by unique content.
This is especially the case for sites with lower Google PageRank because any page in Google’s index that is a “duplicate” of another page on your site will likely take the place of another page that you may wish to have indexed more.
Still though, the 5 items you mention are a bare minimum that everyone should deal with.
Very nice inspiration for my italian version
thanks
its great that you provide enhancements like this, but considering all my blogs are dasblog based i wish we had more people producing SEOtweaks for dasblog
Nice overview.. you might find this usefull as well:
10 SEO tips for WordPress
http://www.seo-portal.com/10-seo-tips-for-wordpress/2006/07/09/
Good tips. I actually need to do number 4.
I can assure you that the best thing to do to bring your blog at the first page is first go for the longtail terms and then write fresh unique content written from you. This is what i’m doing right now for a blog of mine and i’m at google’s first page for a very competitive term and i only have 3 inbound links.
There’s a great Blog plugin called “All in one SEO” it has everything that is need ed by a blog, I cant remember the URL, i’ll try to repost it with the url, but you can also search on google, im sure its there…
The comment-luv plugin for wordpress is a good SEO tool, encourages other bloggers to link to you.