Monday, May 9, 2011

A No Fool Guide For WordPress Weblogs And SEO

I can harp on about it all day long about how important it is to search engine optimize your blog, but is it going to get through? Really? Here's hoping for the best, becuase today I am going to teach you the very basics that you need to do in order to make the search engines love your blog.

So, why would anyone want to SEO their blog? There are a few answers for this, however, the most prominent is that you want more traffic. Believe it or not, the search engines still rule the world of traffic, especially ever green targeted traffic. If you rank for a kewyord that people are searching for, then you are going to share in the volume of people searching for that phrase. Nice and easy.

That said, there is a lot more to SEO than just ranking for phrases. Proper keyword research and competition analysis is key, and will give you an indication of whether or not it is worth trying to rank for a phrase or not. Please, give this some consideration first.

Here's How To SEO Your WordPress Blog

As a bit of a mini disclaimer, I need to let you know that it is very well worth your time learning how to copy wordpress blogs to a new domain. This is a skill that will come in handy, as this process that I am about to teach you can end up being quite lengthy, especially if you want to do this over multiple websites. You have been warned!

Thankfully, this is fully possible using a variety of plugins for WordPress. There are many available, and as you go through this article, you will see that this is a fairly lengthy task. That's ok. I recommend that you learn how to copy wordpress blogs at this post, as that will make light work of this process in the future.

All In One SEO Pack is a great starting point, which once installed, will allow you to set custom meta tags on your blog such as your titles and descriptions. You will need to do some basic keyword research first though, just to make sure that your chosen keywords are actually winnable and targeted. This will make you more likely to rank for that phrase in the search engines, plus you can also tell people why they need to visit your page as well.



Second, you will want to create a sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. Luckily, this is quite easy to do with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. Just so long as your hosting account supports the remote creation of files, this plugin will automatically create and update a sitemap for you. By submitting this to Google Webmaster Tools, you will in effect be keeping Google in the loop with any changes or additions to your blog.

The most important factor is the abilit to be able to track and monitor your traffic. This can be done using Google Analytics. To install Google Analytics, you will need to create a profile for your blog, and install the supplied tracking code on your blog. Usually not an easy task, however a free plugin called Google Analyticator makes light work of this. This plugin works using Google's back end authentication server, and automaticaly adds any code needed.

Now, I know that the last point was not specificaly about SEO, but it is equally as important. The ability to measure where your traffic is coming from, and how much traffic you are getting is of huge importance if you want to improve your traffic.

Don't Lose Sight!

SEO is a very important skill to have. Without it, you will be losing out in the search engines, and may find yourself having to pay for other methods of traffic generation such as PPC, and media buys.

Keep this in the back of your mind when planning out your traffic generation strategy. Just keep moving forward, it will get easier the more that you do it. The guide that I have outlined is the basic foundations, from which point, everything will get much easier.

0 comments:

Post a Comment