Choosy 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 Smart Titles

Give the SEs (and your visitors) a better indication of what your pages are about by succinctly displaying your page and post titles. Within the TITLE tag add this snippet to the header.php file to generate a dynamic title for each and every one of your fabulous pages:

You may want to give some thought to the actual wording of your post titles as well. Search engines give weight to titles just like people do (more or less). They just use logic rather than emotion. I’m not suggesting you should write titles for the engines, but a thoughtfully crafted title containing a keyword which also shows up in your post is going to rank better.

2) Don’t Ignore Your Meta Data

Meta data is not only fun to say – it’s extremely useful in allowing search engines and people to identify your site. Found within the HEAD tag, it’s basically a synopsis of your site and usually includes keywords, a site description and sometimes author info. SEs look for this data when indexing a site. It’s worth your time to include appropriate meta info. If you’re running a WordPress driven site, get this auto meta plugin to do the dirty work for you.

3) Make A Map

Help the engines crawl your site more effectively – by including a sitemap. Doesn’t really matter whether you create one of your own, or use a plugin which creates an xml version for you. Just git ‘er done. Because SEs typically discover pages from internal links, 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:

• For images: alt=”descriptive text”
• For links: title=”descriptive text”

5) Ping Your Posts

The most well-known blogs make a point of pinging new content, which is to say they alert the blog search engines about updates. Some examples include Technorati and IceRocket, though there are tons more. It may sound daunting, but it can be done via automation using WordPress’ update service. Simply get the ping configuration for the blog monitoring sites you wish to notify, and enter each one into the update box of your Options panel within the WP admin.

Note: although this articles was written with WordPress in mind, many of the ideas presented here can be applied to any blog, regardless of what software you’re using to run it.