Simple Blogging SEO Tweaks

February 16, 2008 by Collin LaHay
Filed under: General 

I have been running websites for over a year, but have only recently been blogging. The search engines look at blogs a lot differently than they do for static websites, so I have listed a few simple SEO tweaks that will help your blog rank higher in the search engines and have your blog be more visible to the readers.

Install All in One SEO
All in One SEO is a plugin for Wordpress that does all of the hard work of building correct titles and search engine optimized descriptions for you. After you install this plugin and set it up properly, you only need to focus on link building and writing great content. What a timesaver!

After you have setup and installed All in One SEO, here are a few ways to optimize it for the search engines:

1.) Have your main keyword at the front of your title
Your blog’s homepage is the most powerful page on it. Search engines will rank you higher for your keyword if it is at the front of the title. In a nutshell, use “Make money blogging with Collin LaHay’s blog” instead of “Collin LaHay’s blog helps you make money blogging.”

2.) Use a maximum of two keywords in meta description
If you have zero keywords in your meta description, you will be losing out on search engine traffic. On the other hand, if you have your keyword 20 times in the meta description you will not get any SE traffic. I recommend using 1 to 2 references to your keyword in your description.

3.) Noindex duplicate pages
Your tags, archives, and category pages are so that visitors (not search engines) can find your content easily. All of these pages are completely run on duplicated content found elsewhere on your blog. If a search engine finds your categories page as well as your homepage, your blog will get a duplicate content penalty. Always make sure not to index these types of pages.

4.) Do not add your keyword in all your titles
I originally made this mistake by adding, *title* | Make Money Blogging, to every page on my blog. This DOES NOT help you rank higher, and only lowers your relevancy to search engine traffic. By removing your keyword, you will be able to rank for whatever is in *title* more than you did before. You have all the time in the world to start ranking for your main keyword, but until then you want to rank highly for every blog post you ever write!

For those that learn by pictures, I have included a picture of my All in One SEO setup below:

allin1seo.JPG

*Click on the image for a full screen window*

I hope this helped some of you. If you have any other tips to recommend, or any questions that you are wondering, feel free to ask them in the comments or by emailing me.

Comments

28 Comments on Simple Blogging SEO Tweaks

  1. Widgett Walls on Sat, 16th Feb 2008 3:00 pm

    2. Collin: Another plugin that I’ve used that handles what All in One used to for me plus some other features is Headspace2. Really nifty. And yes, I got hit by the duplicate penalty at one point, noindexed my tags plus other versions of the pages, kept the categories indexed but have the bits beyond the first teaser of the post behind a More tag. Also, made sure that I didn’t have posts spanning multiple categories. Anyway, that appears to have corrected our situation, balancing between what makes the readers happy and what makes the search engines happy.

  2. Neil Groom on Sat, 16th Feb 2008 3:14 pm

    3. Excellent tips. Found through bloggingZoom. Just installed the plugin on my blog. Seems great.

    Thanks for the tip

    Neil

  3. Rakesh on Sun, 17th Feb 2008 5:33 am

    4. I couldn’t understand point 3-Noindex duplicate pages.

    Can you pls explain that in layman terms??

    I have just started learning SEO.

    Thanks.

  4. Sudarshan on Sun, 17th Feb 2008 6:30 am

    5. I am wondering how you no-index the category page…I want to do it??

  5. Collin LaHay on Sun, 17th Feb 2008 12:18 pm

    6. Noindex is a feature in the All in One SEO plugin that stops those pages from being visited by the search engines.

    “Noindex” means that the search engines will not be able to index the page. (The category page will not show up if you do a google search for it).

    If you still do not get it, let me know and I will send you a few links on it.

  6. Collin LaHay on Sun, 17th Feb 2008 12:19 pm

    7. Use the plugin I described and set it up how I did in the screenshot at the bottom of the post.

  7. CaliforniaBeachVacations on Sun, 17th Feb 2008 12:25 pm

    8. Thank you for a break down of it… I had that plugin, but I tweaked it just a little bit to get the most out of it. Thank you very much!

  8. Rakesh on Sun, 17th Feb 2008 9:42 pm

    9. Thanks collin..I got the meaning

  9. Feed Flare on Mon, 18th Feb 2008 7:03 am

    10. Collin, can you fire me that pic. It is not very clear and I need to see it better. It looks like you changed things in your I never have or didn’t know I could. It would be a huge help, thanks.

    One thing that is not talked about lots is how to properly use AIO and how to set it up. Thanks for sharing that.

  10. Jake Cohen on Mon, 18th Feb 2008 10:15 am

    11. Very informative. I didn’t know a lot of this information, thank you!

  11. Futon-Matt on Mon, 18th Feb 2008 11:27 am

    12. Great tips, thanks for the post.

  12. Collin LaHay on Mon, 18th Feb 2008 11:33 am

    13. Click on the image for full screen. Otherwise, the direct link is here:

    http://www.uberlinkbuilding.co.....in1seo.JPG

  13. Graham Smith on Tue, 19th Feb 2008 2:31 am

    14. I need to get this out of my system first, so bear with me. An honest and sincere bout of praise!! I am really liking your site here!! :) Really informative and relevant articles at a time when I am really need all the advice I can get. Just takes time to go through a site when you first come across it.

    I do use the above, but have not really known how to maximise it’s use, so these suggestions seem really practical.

    One question though relating to the site maps you can include. I have two, the Google XML sitemap for Google Webmaster services and a XML sitemap that is actually included on one of my pages. Would this penalise me for duplicate content, so would I be best of to ‘noindex’ this as well? I had read somewhere that it would actually hlep your ranking, but I always doubted that since I have been reading about the consequences of duplicate text.

    Is is then still wise to have a robot.txt file. I don’t have one just yet, frankly a little unsure how to set them up. Do you have any advice or any previous posts on this. Would be a good post to do for future if you haven’t already covered it. I have seen many explanations, but they all seem specific to the site of the authors and I am not always able to see how to change certain aspects for my own use.

    Really valuable site you have here, really is interesting. :)

    Graham Smith
    ImJustCreative
    Blog & Web Ramblings from ‘my’ Gutter.

  14. BaseGuardian on Tue, 19th Feb 2008 6:07 am

    15. Thanks for the tips, I already installed this plugin, but I do not know how to configure it before, now I know. Thanks.

  15. Collin LaHay on Tue, 19th Feb 2008 1:39 pm

    16. Having a robots.txt sure doesn’t hurt!

    I use the Google XML sitemap as it works flawlessly. As for the other sitemap you use, is it the “Dagon wordpress” one? If so, having both of them will not hurt you, but there really is no added benefit to using it.

    Robots.txt is mainly for having the search engines NOT view something, so if you do not have any pages like that then you should be fine. Here is mine for the record:
    http://www.uberlinkbuilding.com/robots.txt

  16. Jake Cohen on Tue, 19th Feb 2008 1:49 pm

    17. Oh… Interesting how you did that with your sitemap.
    Thanks for posting a link to the robots.txt file so that we could see first hand.

    TalkPrice.net

  17. Off-topic Reading on Wed, 20th Feb 2008 9:55 pm

    18. [...] time lapse in my post, it is because I was doing a case study on my last post about simple blogging seo tweaks and how to maximize your search engine rankings with simple changes in your blogging [...]

  18. SiteHoppers on Sun, 24th Feb 2008 12:37 am

    19. Good stuff Collin,
    you are always on top of this shtuff… :)

  19. Justin on Thu, 28th Feb 2008 4:01 am

    20. Great post. Some solid suggestions.

    I consider a robots.txt a must with trying to SEO wordpress due to all the duplicate content and useless stuff google can archive.

    I disagree with your point four. I always include my main keyword in all my titles (since I use it as my site name), but at the very end. I’ve always read this is the best practice.

    I follow Courtney Tuttle’s blog constantly, his suggestion is opposite of yours.

    A few of his posts worth reading (not my site, so not trying to spam):
    http://courtneytuttle.com/2007.....itle-tags/

    http://courtneytuttle.com/2007.....d-sniping/

    http://courtneytuttle.com/sear.....tion-tips/

  20. Some SEO Tweaks on 8 Mar 2008 on Fri, 7th Mar 2008 2:53 pm

    21. [...] such as "Binh dot Name" or "Binh.name" or "Binh". But due to some Simple Blogging SEO Tweaks done by Collin on MixedMarketArts.com I decide to also test out the meta titles without any suffix. [...]

  21. KG Lew on Sun, 13th Apr 2008 3:35 pm

    22. great tips… im am going to install that plugin to my latest blog as soon as i get the chance… if it does all seo optimization work for me, then I just have to concentrate on link building and relaxing :)

  22. Web Development Blog on Fri, 2nd May 2008 9:19 am

    23. Than you for these tiips, it’ll help my blog greatfully

  23. Julie on Wed, 18th Jun 2008 1:52 am

    24. Collin, you are great!!! The information given will be of much assistance for me. I’m really glad to visit your blog…

  24. David from PPC on Wed, 23rd Jul 2008 12:05 am

    25. How to SEO one’s blog is a must read for any current or prospective blogger. No point in doing all the hard work and your information can’t be effectively accessed via potential readers.

  25. WebTrafficROI on Thu, 21st Aug 2008 9:30 am

    26. Good stuff Collin,

    Must for blogger ..highly recommended

  26. Blinds on Sat, 15th Nov 2008 9:39 am

    27. Great stuff Colin, I can honestly say I have never seen this post before yet my All in one SEO was set exactly the same, minus wording obviously.

  27. JerseyGuy on Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 3:44 pm

    28. So for instance if a keyword I want to use is “Hoboken”, I would put that keyword in the front of my title, for instance “Hoboken and New Jersey real estate”?

  28. mmdogtraining on Thu, 9th Apr 2009 8:41 am

    29. AMAZING.. thank your cloin, evetually someone actually gives out some proper information on the all in one seo pack.. thanks may you get as much success throughout your blogging days.

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!