“Out of the box,” most blogging platforms have varying degrees of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendliness. At its most basic, you need to be able to completely control a page or post’s title (the title that appears in the top of the browser), and the post’s meta description. It is important for every page to:
We used the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress to make our learning center SEO friendly.
In an XML sitemap you can quite literally tell the search engines where all of your content is. For this reason you should create such a sitemap and then submit it to Google through Google Webmaster Tools, and to Bing and Yahoo. Many blogging platforms have plugins that will automatically create the XML sitemap for you. We used the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress.
You only need to do this if you have video on your site. This, too, will help make it easy for the search engines to find and index your video content so that you show up in video search results. Again, many blogging platforms may have a plugin for this. If not, you may need to learn how to do this “by hand”. For us, we used the FLV Embed plugin for WordPress to integrate our video content. Conveniently, it automatically creates an XML video sitemap.
You should make it easy for people to rate and share content. This gives other ways for people to find and interact with your content. We added social bookmarking using the AddThis button. We added retweet capabilities using TweetMeme. We also added the capability for users to vote on our content using one of the many star rating plugins available for WordPress. Creating a blog is a great platform to offer interesting and varied content that people will want to link to.
- Craft a good title of 70 characters or less for every post or page. This will probably be similar to the actual article title, but it does not have to be the same. It does, however, need to be related to the subject of the post. This can help with search engine rankings.
- Write a description of your page of 170 characters or less. While this does not help with SEO, it can help with click-through as it often gets shown in the search results.
- Create and Submit an XML Sitemap
- Create and Submit a Video XML Sitemap
- Socialize Your Blog
Hopefully the tips in this article will help you to get the search engine visibility you need to make your blog successful.
