I’m starting the SEO Training section with some SEO tips for blogs to increase your traffic, specifically self-hosted Wordpress blogs. Whatever the purpose, I’m sure that you’d want others to know about your blog, especially after spending so much time and effort writing - I know I would. Before we begin, some of you may ask why you should even bother listening to a blogger with barely 2 weeks of experience with Wordpress - good question! The answer is that I always consider the marketing aspect when embarking on any online projects. Since I’m not technically-trained and can’t create fancy websites, I need to rely on my marketing skills to have an edge over my competition. For example, I took over a forum in November last year and without a clue about how the IPB forum software works. But I managed to grow my community of less than 2,000 members to almost 9,000 members in 5 months - a 350% growth! The Vista Forums is one of the biggest unofficial Windows Vista forum today, receiving close to 7,000 visitors/day and ranks #1 on Google for “windows vista forum” and “vista forum”. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, here are my SEO recommendations for Wordpress blogs: 1) Put Your Post In Only 1 Category 2) Make Use Of The “Read More” Feature 3) Related Posts 4) Create Attractive Titles 5) Customize Your Permalinks 6) Have Different Meta Titles Update: I’ve managed to find a solution to the problem here. 7) Create Description And Keyword Meta Tags 8) Create Technorati Tags For Each Post 9) Generate A Sitemap 10) Use A Pinging Service Note that all the SEO recommendations above are specific to the Wordpress blog and do not include general SEO strategies like keyword analysis and linkbuilding - we’ll keep that for future lessons. ;) If you appreciate my effort, feel free to: Thanks for reading,
Make it easier for the search engines to find your posts by putting them into only 1 category.
Make use of the “More” tag - leave the first paragraph on the mainpage and the rest of the content on the post page. This helps prevent duplicated content and keeps you off Google’s Supplemental Index.
There’s a Wordpress plugin called “Contextual Related Posts” that automatically displays 5 of your previous related posts below the comment box. It’s an old (2005) plugin that works by simply activating it in your Wordpress Dashboard. With related posts you get more inner links, exposure for older posts and stickiness on your blog.
Getting more exposure is not enough but you need to get people to want to click on your link. Think of a creative title that can get potential readers interested, e.g. “How to cheat Ping.sg” (see image above).
Wordpress creates boring URLs for your posts by default, e.g.
www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/?p=5
You can customize the permalinks to embed your title (with keywords) into the URL, e.g.
www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/chief-marketing-officer-2007/5/
Simply set your preference in your Wordpress Dashboard and add some commands into the .htaccess file.
There’s a Wordpress plugin called “SEO Title Tag” that lets you set different meta titles for every post, including the static pages and categories. A meta title is the title that appears in your browser header when viewing a page and it’s also the title for your pages in search engine results. Unfortunately, this plugin is still in beta and was showing MySQL errors for my Wordpress version 2.1.2.
You can also set your meta description and keyword tags for all your posts, static pages and category pages using a Wordpress plugin called “Add-Meta-Tags“. These meta tags are used by search engines when ranking your blog pages in search results. By default, the first full sentence is automatically used as your meta description, while the category is used for your meta keywords. There’s an option to set them manually by using custom fields in Wordpress when writing a post.
There’s a Wordpress plugin called “Bunny’s Technorati Tags” that lets you manually insert tags for your posts. This helps increase your presence and gain more exposure at the Technorati blog search engine. While we’re at that, you should probably add “Action Buttons” to your posts - those cute little buttons you see on other blogs. It provides your readers a convenient way of adding your posts to social networking sites like Digg.com and Del.icio.us. I’d advise using a maximum of 5 buttons because any more than that may confuse your readers and create an ugly clutter.
Next, make sure to generate an XML sitemap so that the search engines know which pages to crawl - you can use a Wordpress plugin called “Google Sitemaps” to do this automatically. Then inform Google and Yahoo about the location of your sitemap.
Blog pinging services like Pingoat help you ping or notify a number of blog agregators and blog search engines, e.g. Technorati and Syndic8, whenever you update your blog. This helps increase your blog’s presence on the Internet and creates more avenues for visitors to find you.
- add me to your Technorati favourites using the button on the left.
- blog about this article.
- add me to your blogroll if you’re a blogger.
- join my community at MyBlogLog.
Larry Lim
Singapore SEO Consultant
“I’ll see you at number 1″
Singapore Online Marketing Blog
Practical Online Marketing Tips for Singapore SMEs
Thanks, its nice. It is always nice to know how to do it by yourself. And actually there is some offers which helps people to set up a worldpress blog for something like US100. If people hang around in the blogs like yours, they can save it.
Comment by Chinese SEO on April 9, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Hi Larry,
Even though we have not met, I’ve been seeing your name whenever I google for SEO related terms since early last year. I thought you are one of the most genuine SEO experts in the region.
When I googled for “singapore seo” this morning, I saw the listing of your larrylim.net and it has been in the top 10 for many months. Great job!
I am wondering if we can collaborate and contribute to the training and development of SEO/SEM industry in the region.
Comment by Shi Hengcheong on April 17, 2007 at 9:15 am
Shi, I’ll drop you an email.
Comment by Larry on April 17, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Wow, very solid article. This is the type of quality content that attracts visitors like me. Keep up the good work, that is some helpful stuff!
Also, I might link to this article in my Link of the Day feature. I believe the next available slot will be on Saturday, so you can check back then if you’d like.
Comment by Brent on April 19, 2007 at 11:38 am
Thanks Brent - just sharing from experience. Glad it helped you. ;)
Comment by Larry on April 19, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Very nice post! This information looks like it will help me a lot when I make my upcoming blog.
Comment by David Parker on April 19, 2007 at 8:09 pm
nice posting..solid article..good work larry..i could get more info here..thanks..
Comment by Badri Shaharudin on May 31, 2007 at 9:24 am
bookmark this!
Comment by weirdoux on June 17, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Good list and good information. I have been adding the title by adding the title tag in the head when building a template.
I’ve often wondered why they left off the title and keywords.
Comment by PHP MySql Programmer / Developer on June 29, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Great Information for a new blogger like me!
Regards
Comment by Gerard Espinas on September 23, 2007 at 12:37 am
Great information, I agree with everything that you talk about to what increases all the SEO efforts, and also what it takes to get a site ranked high in the search results.
Comment by Daryl Saari on June 25, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Hi Larry,
Very useful article, I just started to do my blog on 27 July. Now only i read your seo tips on blogs. I have one question, i’m using blogger instead of wordpress. if i switch to wordpress, then will it get penalty from google because i will repost my article. Is it neccessary to redo my blog in word press?
regards
Comment by Sanndra on August 4, 2008 at 11:50 am
Sanndra: Firstly, I hope you’re aware that the tips here are based on your own installed Wordpress and not using the hosted version at Wordpress.com.
You’re right that you’ll likely be hit with duplicate content penalty is you repost the same articles to Wordpress. What you can do is remove your old articles at Blogger, write that your blog has been moved to Wordpress and put a link to your new blog.
You could also keep the first paragraphs of your old posts at Blogger and have a “More…” link to the corresponding full article on Wordpress.
Hope that helps.
Comment by Larry on August 4, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Hi Larry,
I have resetup my blog and do according to your instructions, keep the first paragraphs of the old post and put “read more” to link to my new blog.
thanks & regards,
Comment by Sanndra on August 18, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Good post.
Comment by Fost on December 29, 2008 at 7:18 am
Thanks for sharing this.
Comment by PHP Programmer on January 1, 2009 at 10:56 pm
thanks for this info.
Comment by kenntrix on February 4, 2010 at 4:19 pm
good tips for wordpress…
Thanks for the tips and post.
Comment by anil on March 9, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Adsense is just such a great and easy methode to get money. With this article I was able to generate even more money with adsense. Like it got a lot more traffic. Now I will be able to quite my job soon. Thx for writing this.
Comment by nick on August 30, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Thanks nice tips. SEO is always tricky for everyone especially for newbie. They just try aggressively to get rank and do anything possible. But that’s affect their sites negatively sometimes get ban from. Some of the common mistakes newbie commit are link building too quick, building backlink with only one keyword, build backlink only on home page not individual pages. Build backlinks from low quality sites and irrelevant sites.
Comment by alamin on April 6, 2011 at 3:41 pm
I had a phone call today about someone who needed help with SEO. I am not good at teaching (imho) but I gave him as much info as I could. The person on the other end of the phone had a passion about their website that many business owners forget to have at the rush of making as much money as they can. This post helped me get some key points across to him, thanks.
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