On-Site SEO Optimization
Most bloggers love talking about the many off-site SEO optimization techniques you can use to get better SE rankings, but most neglect to also discuss on-site SEO optimization. If you don’t have a strong handle on your on-site SEO optimization of your blog then you will never see the full affect of your off-site marketing and promotion work. I actually work solely on the on-site SEO of my blog before I even begin starting my off-site SEO methods because without on-site SEO you won’t go very far. There are quite a few ways to make sure your blog is optimized for the search engines and that is exactly what we’re going to discuss in this article.
The first thing to do is make sure all of your meta tags are filled out properly and optimized correctly for your blog. The most important tag is the title tag which basically every search engine uses to gather information pertaining to your blog so make sure that this is filled out properly. You also need to make sure you write a custom description and add keywords to your blogs pages. There is a plug-in for WordPress which lets you make custom titles, keywords and description for each page on your blog and it’s something I couldn’t live without. You don’t need any knowledge of meta tags or HTML to be able to utilize the plug-in either which I find to be awesome.
After you’ve got all your meta tags and other important tags set-up you need to then create a sitemap for your blog. Now there is a plug-in that does this for you but you should also create your own HTML sitemap which is simply a new page on your blog with links to every page on the blog. This will allow the search engines to easily crawl your site and therefore index your pages a lot quicker then if you didn’t have a sitemap.
Once done setting up the sitemap you can begin looking at your content that is already on the blog. Make sure the content is optimized for the keywords that you’re targeting and also clean up any messy code that you notice. Messy code is bad for your search engine optimization and you should do the best you can to clean up all loose ends of coding so that you’re blog is optimized as well as it can be. Also make sure you add in keywords to previous posts for the new keywords that you’re targeting as it will help.
There is more you can do to make sure you have properly done your on-site SEO but there is always more that can be done. On-site SEO is a never ending task that takes time and effort out of your schedule every week, but without it your blog won’t do well at all. The more optimized you make your blog the more exposure you’ll receive from the search engines and if you’re receiving more exposure from the SE’s that directly turns into traffic and possible revenue.