Optimizing Your Blog

There are many mentors and gurus online claiming to be able to teach you how to SEO (Search Engine Optimize) your content in order to get it showing in the organic search results and of course, help keep your Adwords costs down when Google and other search engines are looking at the relevance of your site.

One thing I find quite amusing, particularly with one of the businesses that Tranque and I work with, is so called ‘mentors’ and ‘gurus’ claiming to be able to teach you the ‘Dark Art’ of SEO, but fail to put in to place some of the basic SEO practices on their own sites.

Wordpress

Wordpress blogs are a particular favorite of mine for SEO. There are many, many tricks over the years that people have had to employ to make their blog as optimized as possible. But over time, Wordpress has evolved to be a hugely powerful and search engine friendly platform even in its most basic form. However, there are still a few tricks that you can implement to get the most out of your blog.

One of those is to make sure your permalinks are displaying keyword relevant content. As default, when you write a post for your blog, Wordpress creates a unique URL for that page, which is the blog’s URL, followed by a page ID number, such as ?p=398 – Now, I’m sure, even as a beginner, you can see that ?p=398 holds no real relevance to the content of our blog, and certainly won’t help search engines build a picture of what your site is all about.

With website SEO there are 4 On-Page SEO factors that we have total control over. One of those is the URL, or domain name. Is the keyword phrase we are looking to rank for included in the domain name, or indeed does it include any semantically related keywords?

Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.

Source

So how do we change ?p=398 into a relevant keyword for Search engines.

Well, the first thing we need to do is go to our Wordpress Dashboard and look under Settings / Permalinks -

Once here we need to change our permalink from the default setting to custom. Now we can choose how our site will display the URL. In the case of this blog, we have chosen to display the main URL followed by the post category and then the post name – so we are left with a URL of www.DomainName.com/category/postname

Once there, select the custom setting and add /%category%/%postname%/

Then remember to select Save

Confused?

Watch the video below

Along with the ability to edit your permalink from within the post itself, this gives you the ability to create highly optimized post url’s without actually having to cram keywords into the titles of every post you create.

MyExpressSite, our preferred hosting company, has a fantastic quick guide to setting up your Wordpress blog which you can download Here.

In later posts I shall be talking about the other 3 essential elements of On-Page optimization that you have no excuse not to be using.

Any tips, or thoughts on Google or other search engines criteria. Add your comments and let us know what you think.

FaceBook

Tagged as: Search Engine Optimization, seo, Wordpress