Start Blogging
Check your blog after making a post – always!
You need to avoid broken links, missing images, empty pages, etc., because when the Search Engines find these, they may discontinue crawling your pages. Make certain the title, description, and category display properly. Be prepared for occasional blow ups. Learning what caused the problem and figuring out how to fix it is part of the learning curve.
Pages, Categories, and Posts
Use pages to feature static content that should stay the same and in the same place, without changing frequently. We use static pages for things like Road Condition links and Travel Resource Information (passports and such).
Use categories to arrange your posts into logical themes within your blog.
Categorization makes it easier for both the Search Engines and humans to tell what a post is about and to find other posts containing related information. Choose only one category for each post, whenever practical. Putting a post in more than one category creates duplicate content because the snippet or optional excerpt will display on each category page that is chosen for the post. Therefore, it’s better to set up more categories on your blog and to limit the number of categories for each post to only one – never more than two.
Use Keywords in your post titles
Use keywords in your post titles, but don’t limit your blog posts to topics that relate to great keyword phrases. When you write your title, simply think about how you want a searcher to find that article in the Search Engine results. If your post is about the wide variety of widgets available, it is feasible someone would possibly search for “widget options” to find your article.
Don’t build out pages until you have content for them
The Search Engines frown upon you wasting their time and resources spidering Under Construction pages or pages without content. So, do not create pages until you have something worthwhile to put on them.
Do not copy and paste content directly from Microsoft Word into WordPress
Microsoft’s built-in formatting can cause a multitude of problems within WordPress pages and posts. In addition to “blowing out” your blog, it can create very odd URLs with things like percentage signs in them or unwanted formatting of your text. Copy your content from Word into Notepad, which strips out the Word formatting, and then put it into your blog.
Theme Your Posts
Don’t just cram your keyword phrases in a post five times – think about appropriately theming your post using synonymous and supporting words. For example, if your post is about travel use words like vacation, trip, expedition, adventure, and getaway in your article.
If you have good information and insight to share with your readers, you’ll find that your posts will become naturally themed as you write them. If this isn’t happening for you, you may need to narrow your focus on your topic.
Link out!
It helps your readers and the Search Engines. Where useful to the reader, link from your posts to external resources. Linking to authority sites, like Wikipedia or WordPress, using good anchor text supporting the content of your page helps to theme it and establish relevance.
Spread the link love
Many of us who have been in the SEO biz for a while tend to want to direct and manipulate the PageRank on our sites. However, blogs are all about linking freely, not just to other posts and pages within your own site, but also out to other web sites and blogs. Use the Follow plugin in our SEO Plugins section to counteract the WordPress no-follow default.
People usually find out when you link to them, especially other bloggers. This often prompts them to come to your blog to find out who you are and what you said about them. They may then link back to you and become a member of your community. Spread your link love around and karma may bring it back to you!
Use a blogroll
Use the blogroll feature of WordPress to point links to other blogs on your topic you read and respect. Those bloggers will be alerted to your interest and may respond in kind. Inclusion of your link in the blog rolls of others may be an indicator of blog quality to Google.
Link Between Related Posts
Where useful to the reader, link from one post to another using good link text. This will greatly improve the SEO of your internal linking structure.
Use one Post for One Topic
The best way to keep each post relevant to its title is to write powerful, keyword-rich text about a single topic. If you find yourself straying off-topic, then write another post and link to it from the original post. This will help to keep your content focused on particular themes and make them more relevant to the Search Engines.
Use Optional Excerpts
Everyone knows that duplicate content is no good for SEO, so be certain to use the Optional Excerpt feature built into WordPress to make your category pages unique. Without it, category pages will contain content duplicated from the post pages in that category.
When you put text in this box for a post:
It will show up on your category page like this:
When this field is left blank, the post snippet on the category pages display duplicate text taken from the first part of the post, like this:
Your category pages are very important because they help to theme your content and to link to related posts from a powerfully on-topic page. Therefore, it is important to keep them from being ignored because they only contain content found elsewhere.
No-Index Your Archives
Archive pages can be useful to humans in finding information on your blog. However, these can be flagged as duplicate content, as well, since they will either duplicate text found on either your post pages (if you do not use Optional Excerpts) or on your category pages (if you do use Optional Excerpts).
Therefore, make your Archives pages more or less invisible to the Search Engines by placing no index tags on them.
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