5 Simple Steps For Improving SEO
Apr 16th, 07 | 2 remarksChoosy bloggers choose Wordpress. They know it’s a tool which allows for a lot of flexibility in design, content presentation, and website administration. The same is true when it comes to search engine optimization. Think it’s hard? All you need is a couple of good plugins, and a some tweaks to enhance your site’s visibility with the big boys.
1) Use Your Words
Give the SE’s (and your visitors) a better indication of what your pages are about by proudly (and more succinctly) displaying your titles. Just add this snippet to your header.php file to generate a dynamic title for each and every one of your fabulous pages:
Oh, and you may want to give some thought to the actual wording of your titles as well. This doesn’t only apply to page titles, but all titles within your articles/posts. SE’s give weight to titles just like people do (more or less). SE’s use logic, whereas people use emotion. Either way, use catchy titles and you’ll go far.
2) Get Your Meta Straight
What in the world is META data, and why is it so fun to say? Basically, it’s a brief bit of information about a website. Found in the <head> tag, it usually includes keywords, a site description and sometimes author info. SE’s look for this data when indexing a site. As for the fun factor, other than saying it there’s nothing very exciting about META data. It IS however, very useful, and you can make your life simpler by getting this auto meta plugin to do your dirty work.
3) Make A Map
Help the engines crawl your site more effectively - get a sitemap. Doesn’t really matter whether you create one of your own, or use a plugin which creates an xml version or you. Just get ‘er done. Because SE’s typically discover pages from links within a site, the benefits of having a sitemap are obvious.
4) Offer a Tip
Be a good little blogger, and add tooltips to your links and images. Not only will the search engine gods smile upon you, your visitors may too! Examples for entering a tooltip:
Images
alt="descriptive text"
Links
title="descriptive text"
5) Ping Your Posts
The most well-known blogs probably do a good job of regularly pinging new content, which is to say they alert the blog search engines to updates. Some examples include Technorati and IceRocket, though there are tons more. It may sound daunting, but it can easily be done via automation using Wordpress’ update services. Simply dig up the ping configurations for the blog monitoring sites you wish to notify, and enter each one into the update box of your Options admin under the Writing tab. Bing! (or should I say Ping) you’re done!
FYI, although this post was written with Wordpress in mind, many of the principles noted here can be applied to any blog, regardless of what platform you’re using.
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Jun 7, 07 | 11:13 amAn SEO will also monitor the levels of web traffic the site is generating, as well as the search keywords/search engines used by website visitors. A business might be focused on the rankings the website is receiving for their top keywords…of more value to the SEO is reading their web stats to see how site visitors are actually finding the website.
Jun 21, 08 | 9:47 am