Initial Steps to SEO’ing Your Blog
When you first start out blogging you’ll most likely have no clue what you should do in order to make your blog more search engine optimized, and if you don’t then you need to learn quickly. Without properly making sure that your blog is ready for the search engines in the early stages, you could easily miss something important and then not notice it for awhile. This is why I find it so important to make sure that you follow certain steps each time you start a fresh blog. If you follow the simple steps I’m about to outline for you then you should be able to have search engine traffic coming into your blog within a week from starting it. There is more you can do then just the things listed here to make your blog even more SEO optimized, but if you follow these steps it’s a good start for now if you don’t know what else to do.
The first thing that you should do is make sure that you change the permalink structure in the wordpress admin section, and also make sure that you allow search engines to crawl the site. There is an option near the permalink structure option that will show you whether or not you’re allowing or blocking search engines, so make sure that this is switched to allowing the search engines. I once made the mistake of not checking this for a couple months and wondered why my blog had no indexed pages, and sure enough it’s because I was blocking them from crawling my site, so make sure you choose the right option.
After you do those two simple things you can then install the all-in-one SEO plug-in for wordpress which will allow you too choose the title, keyword and description for each page of your blog. These titles, keywords and descriptions are what the search engines will be reading when displaying their results so make sure that you optimize this section as best you can. The more searched phrases that you can get rankings for on the search engines the more traffic you’ll end up getting, so make sure that you take the time to set the proper titles, keywords and descriptions for each page and post.
There are now two more plug-ins that you should download to finish off this quick process and that’s the Google Sitemap Generator and KB Robot Txt plug-in. This will help your blog get more search engine traffic and will help your blog get its pages indexed faster in the search engines. It takes only a mere five minutes to set-up the two plug-ins so that there functional.
Now you just about have a nicely SEO’d wordpress blog that you can begin filling up with blog posts for the search engines. From here you spend a bit of time each day submitting to some blog directories, social bookmarking sites and comments on other blogs. All of these techniques will help keep your SEO on good track and after a month or two of doing this you should begin seeing that you have some nice rankings in the search engines. Of course the more searched the phrases you rank for the more traffic you’ll get so try your best to rank for the most searched keywords in your niche. Sometimes these keywords can take months to get rankings for, so don’t become discouraged if it doesn’t happen overnight. Some keywords will lots of competition will be really hard to get, but if you ever do get it then you could strike rich with the amount of traffic you’d get. You’d be surprised at how many different keywords you could rank for with a blog, and it doesn’t take long to start getting those rankings if you put in a bit of work.