Catalyst Search Matters Search Marketing Blog

Ok. I know. Everyone has one of these Top [insert number here] lists for optimizing your blog for search engines, and this is by no means reinventing the wheel, but we here at Search Matters thought that we would add our list to the fray in case you missed something.

First of all, let’s back up a bit. Why would you want to make your blog more SEO friendly? ‘I thought blogs were inherently search friendly‘, you might ask. Well they are. And they’re not. Although most blog publishing platforms generate beautiful, compliant, cross compatible code there are a few issues that can cause search engines to bog down when they spider your site.

Therefore, making certain that you have an optimized site is essential to maximizing your exposure gaining good positions in the SERP’s. So where to begin? Many of these are best practices for whatever blog platform you use, but we use Wordpress here, so some of these are wordpress specific.

1. Optimize your title tag. By default most Wordpress and Blogspot templates write the title of the blog into the title tag then the post title like:

Your BLOG NAME | Your Your Post Title and Post Date

While that’s good, most of us don’t have to worry about ranking for our domain name or blog title. So it’s best to have the Post Title first and then the blog name. There are many templates now that do this by default but you can also do this with a plugin (in Wordpress… see below).

Also, now that we’re on the subject, you need to use juicy keywords in your titles as well. Placing your keywords at or near the beginning of the title ensures that they carry the weight necessary to get noticed by search engines. Article titles become the de facto permalink title and the description in many templates, making sure these are optimized is germane to SEO friendliness.
2. Clean up your template. Extraneous PHP (or any other server code) can slow down your website. Many templates that lots of optional features like K2 (the one this site is currently using) can bog down load times because thee server has to check the presence of modules, widgets or plugins that you may not even be using. It’s best to clean these out if you can to speed up you template. This affects usability more that search friendliness but it’s still a best practice.

Also, search engines have to read through the HTML code generated by your template so making sure that the code is nice and clean is very important. Do a “view source” of you blog’s home page to see how your code looks. If all the sidebar stuff is in before the content, then you may want to think about switching templates. Incidentally here is a good link to some really nice Web 2.0 style SEO friendly wordpress templates.
3. Search Friendly Plugins. Everyone has their favorites here are ours. This bullet got way too long so we gave it its own post here.
4. Move your Blogroll to its own page. This one is a little controversial. As many of us know, reciprocal linking is being frowned upon (even with rel=nofollow) by the search engines. In fact, pages with more than 50 outgoing links are sometimes viewed as spam pages and devalued by the SE’s - especially if a large percentage of those links are reciprocal. However, if you have lots of friends, colleagues and heroes on the web you want to link to them in your blogroll. However, most blogrolls live in the sidebar of every single page on your blog which means that every page runs the risk of being devalued or penalized.

So what to do? Create a single page that has your blogroll on it either using a plugin like this one or manually in wordpress. Also consider banning certain SE bot using robots.txt (especially if you think your site has been penalized). The blog roll is for humans not bots.
5. Get rid of excessive pagination. Pagination is great for users who want to pour through your archives, but for search engines it can be an endless loop of duplicate content; which ultimately leads to dropped pages or duplication penalties. There are several ways around this issue.

The first is to put your sidebar archives link in a drop down list (I recommend this no matter how your pagination is set up).

The second is to put your archives on a single static page. It’s okay to use a dynamic archive like ELA but make sure that spiders can only get there from one spot.

Another tip is to adjust your pagination to Previous and Next rather than having a numbered list. This makes the SE’s have to work to get through your archives. To avoid duplicate content you should also make sure that archive results pages (and internal search results pages) only pull snippets of the articles. For deeper info, SEOmoz has a great article on pagination.

6. Write well, do good work. Writing good compelling copy that is search engine friendly is an achievement that everyone in our industry strives for. Therefore explaining in one numbered bullet is quite impossible (well, not impossible - but that would make for one long bullet). Just remember to write for people first, but with search engines in mind and you should be all set. But don’t take my word for it.

Okay that’s it for now. Do you have any tips that weren’t mentioned here? Want to dispute anything listed here? Weigh in in the comments section.