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In this day and age, it gets harder and more complicated to make your blog or web site stand out in the crowd. One of the things that beginning bloggers probably don’t pay attention to as much as they should is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of making your site easier to read by search engines and making the necessary changes to facilitate this. These following tips are mostly for WordPress but the concepts can be used on any web site.

Use the All In One SEO Plugin for WordPress

This is one of the easiest and fastest ways to almost instantly optimize your blog for search engines. The All in One SEO Plugin is a very easy plugin to use and set-up for maximum SEO performance.

Like a lot of powerful plugins, it may seems very complicated at first. This plugin gives you easy access to specifying what you want for the page titles, headings, etc. You will have to look into what the most important things to emphasize are elsewhere, but the plugin makes it incredibly easy to do. You can hardcore in meta tages and the like, but most of them can be filled in with variables. This is especially handy for circumstances like building the page titles appearing in the browser’s title bar. The original designer of the plugin recently announced he was ceasing development, but a new designer has stepped up to keep this amazing plugin going.

Build a Sitemap

Once again, a developer has stepped up and created an awesome plugin for building a sitemap. A sitemap tells Google where to find the important pages in your site. A search engine does no look at your site like we do. If it comes across a problem, it may not be able to jump from page to page. This is why it is so important to make sure you have valid code. The sitemap just makes the search bot’s life easier.

Stop messing around and actually post

It is generally regarded that when you first create a web site, Google sort of keeps it in a sandbox and won’t really let the page site climb in the search engine rankings right away. The longer your domain name is around means it looks like it is actual content and not just a link farm. If your site is devoid of decent content, Googlebot will figure this out and will figure there isn’t much to see and won’t come by often. However, if you are constantly creating new content, Googlebot will pick up on this and try to get back to your site sooner. This is important because the more Googlebot comes to your site, the quicker changes will be reflected in the search engine results.

Get quality links to your site

This is quite possibly one of the most important things you can do to optimize your site: getting quality pages to link to your pages. Google trusts that if others are linking to you, you have content worth linking to. I will reiterate on just how important this is constantly. Nothing will do quite as much for SEO as this and making your titles and headings stand out.

I hope you takes these tips, and feel free to include your own in the comments.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2008. It is Filed under: Tutorials, WordPress Help, WordPress Plugins

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