Social Media

Optimizing your blog for search engines

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Lately, blog optimization has been catching on like a wild fire. People have been blogging about their increase in search engine traffic due to SEO and others are starting to realize that they need to optimize their blog. There are many different ways that you can optimize your blog, but here is what I recommend doing.
###URL Structure
The URL structure of your blog should filled with words and try to avoid numbers and extraneous characters. Many people like the date in their URLs, but I prefer it as domain.com/posttitle. This keeps the URL short, easy to remember and crawlable.
###Page Titles
Search engines use the page titles in their search results. Most blogs have their page titles as Blog Name >> Post Title but I recommend just having the page title as the Post Title. Here is the code I use for Movable Type and WordPress.
Movable Type

<title><$MTEntryTitle$></title>
WordPress

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); } elseif ( is_category() ) {
single_cat_title(); echo ” – “; bloginfo(‘name’);
} elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) {
single_post_title();
} elseif (is_search() ) {
bloginfo(‘name’); echo ” search results: “; echo wp_specialchars($s);
} else { wp_title(”,true); }
?>
</title>

###Meta Description
Search engines usually see your content as duplicate. Granted it usually is not duplicate content, but without a unique meta description tag on each of your posts you are hampering your search engine traffic.
Movable Type

<meta name=”description” content=”<$MTEntryBody words=”25″$> …” />
WordPress

If you use WordPress download the head meta description plugin. Set it at 15 to 25 words. Somewhere within that range is usually fine.
###Headings
The headings should represent your blog content, do not stuff tons of keywords within your headings. When using headings you have many choices, but try to use H1, H2, or H3 headings.
###Section 508
Pictures and text links should have a tooltip when they are hovered over. You want to use “alt” tags on pictures and “title” tags on the text links. Make sure that the alt and title tags represent the picture or link and try not stuff irrelevant keywords within them. Here is the code for alt and title tags.
Alt

alt=”enter description here”
Title

title=”enter description here”
###Sitemap
Most blogs do not have a sitemap and they do not need one, but it cannot hurt. You can use Google’s webmaster tools to create a sitemap. This will just help the spiders index your site thoroughly and efficiently.
###301 Redirect
When people link to your blog they usually link to http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com. Because of this the search engines usually see them as two separate sites and you may have 100 sites that link to http://domain.com and 50 sites that link to http://www.domain.com. If the search engines saw it as 150 links in total instead of 50 and 100 your rankings would most likely go up. You want to consolidate the links and do a 301 permanent redirect in your .htaccess file. Here is the code that I use:
Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^YOURDOMAIN.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Make sure the code is on 4 lines in your .htaccess file and replace “YOURDOMAIN” with your domain name.
###Linking
Don’t be a link Nazi. Make sure to link out to other related websites within your content; it can only help with your search engine rankings. By linking out, those sites might link back or include your blog in their blogroll. The more related incoming links you have, the higher you should rank on the search engines.
###Pinging
If you want to increase your traffic you have to ping the blog search engines. You can do this through ping-o-matic or pingoat. If you use FeedBurner they also have a list of blog search engines that you can ping through them. By doing this every time you write a blog post, it will show up on search engines such as Technorati and Icerocket.
These are the things that you should do to your blog to maximize your search engine rankings. It cannot hurt to optimize your blog the right way, so give it a whirl and watch what happens to your traffic. You might see a drastic increase in search traffic or you may see little to no traffic increases. This all depends on the age of your blog and how optimized it already is, either way it cannot hurt to optimize your blog.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider that helps companies make better business decisions. Neil also blogs about marketing and entrepreneurship at Quick Sprout.

Speak your mind!

  4. Neil, do you have any pointers to convert existing posts from WP in the year/month/date format to domain.com/posttitle format so that people who are using the old format url dont get 404s when domain.com/posttitle comes in place? Nice article.

  5. Amit, you could do a 301 permanent redirect of each old URL (year/month/date) to each new URL (domain.com/posttitle) in the .htaccess file. It might be time consuming, but it would work.

  6. You mention that “text links should have a tooltip when they are hovered over”, however you do not practice this yourself. What gives?

  9. Adam, thanks so much for that. I just saw Neil’s post about redirecting using the .htaccess, and I was wondering if there was a plugin that would make it easier for me, and boom, I saw your comment. Thanks again :D

  23. Thanks for showing the .htaccess code on that 301 redirect-very helpful! One of the most important things you can do (and one of the most difficult to accomplish because of the work involved) is to get other quality related sites to link to you. Not only that, but with the right keywords in the anchor text of the links. Whenever anyone wants to link to you, you can provide them with the exact code to do so.

  29. I am agree with your WordPress code composition of the Page Titles, that would make the page easily recognized if appeared in Google (or other search engine) search result.
    Thanks you very much for the tips.

  31. I Totally Disagree with you Mr. Patel and all the people commenting positively on this post.
    I wonder Why Darren Rowse blogged this?
    P.S
    —
    Just implementing your Day 6 Tip ;-)

  33. Your Section 508 section is inaccurate; if you want info to show up when you hover over something, you always use the title attribute. Images need the alt attribute for text that will be shown if the image isn’t shown (e.g. a text-based web browser like Lynx).

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