Recently, I got some good suggestions with a friend who has been running a successful blog for years. Here are his tips to manage a blog as well as making money with it.

Some Facts about the Page Ranking

You know that there are more than 50 million blogs on the Internet and everyday, new blogs come up in numbers. If you don’t stand out you will have no chance. Below are some key points that you need to take care about according to my experience with blog.

The first second of a visitor’s attention is the most crucial.

Your main traffic should come to articles and posts inside your blog, not the home page or other pages.

The quality and quantity of links to your blog will have a strong influence on your blog ranking in Google.

The best way to get links is by natural recommendations from other bloggers or web site owners.
 

Some Tips to Optimize Your Blog

There are a number of things you really should do to improve your blog even if you have a good template which is well designed and structured already. This will help you to do better in optimization for search engines. Now let’s have a look at how others’ do.
 

Using the best URLs

To enable the permalinks is easy and you have probably already done that, just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel. But what format is the best to choose? The structure and post name, nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. And if you have it like this it does not matter if you change the category of the article or republish it with a new date, it will always be the same URL.
 

Title Tags

The title tag is the most important HTML-tag in terms of SEO.

Here are different versions you should use inside the <title></title> located in theme/header.php

Optimum ranking:

<?php if(is_home()) { echo ‘Your blogs name | Few important words’; } else { wp_title(”) ;} ?>

For branding purposes:

<?php if(is_home()) { echo ‘Your blogs name | Few important words’; } else { echo ‘Your blogs name:’; wp_title(”) ;} ?>
 

The Best Title Tag Solution for Advanced Users

Either install and properly use the SEO Title Tag plugin or do the following:

Download and install this plugin.

Replace <?php get_header(); ?> with the context in header.php on single.php, page.php and category.php.

Work out the best titles for the different versions and use the plugin to create different versions of category.php and single.php with their own versions of title tags. For example if your category with ID 5 is “SEO News” you could have the following title tag in single-cat-5.php:

<title>SEO News: <?php { wp_title(”) ;} ?></title>

In category.php you could have: <title><?php { wp_title(”) ;} ?> | Your Name</title>
 

Site Map

A Site Map is where your visitors go to navigate and find specific articles and posts on your blog. It is also a place for search engines to find links to all your pages on your blog.
 

What about a Google Sitemap?

It is not needed. There is no reason for a WordPress blog with a proper navigation structure to submit a Google Sitemap other than for information purposes. A Google Sitemap does not improve your ranking, only crawling, and that is not a problem.
 

Customize Your Blog

Everyone has different tastes about design but here are points to think about when you design your blog:

• Keep the design simple, very simple.
• Have the body text big with big and clear headings.
• For some reason blogs are not liked in the big social network sites (like digg, reddit etc) so make your theme unique and try to make it look like a site and not a blog.
• Make sure nothing steals attention from your text.
• The text width should not be longer than one and a half alphabet, even shorter.
• When a visitor reaches an article on your blog, the text should be seen instantly. Have the text as far up as possible. A visitor should not have to scroll to reach the content
• If you are not making decent money with ads I suggest you to erase all ads you have on the blog.

Tags: blog, marketings, tips