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Over the last few years blogging has taken leaps and bounds with not only it’s writer-ship, but it’s amazing uses to market a mother site, one’s views, or even producing an income all on it’s own. Because of it’s ease of use and publishing, anyone can (and almost everyone does) have a blog. They are incredibly easy to start (as of this writing I have personally created and marketed 6 blogs in the last 3 months. Not all mine I promise), incredibly easy to use, and ever increasingly easy to promote. With this article I want to go, step-by-step, through the process I have begun to fall into and show you how to optimize your WordPress blog for search engine rankings.

A lot of this is SEO as normal, with optimization of the pages, titles, description, and content. But with WordPress optimization (and blogging in general) there are a few things to be aware of, a few things to make your efforts run a little smoother.

The Blog
The first thing we need to decide is whether or not you should be blogging in the first place. Blogging is open to anyone, but to be effective in the search engines and your soon-to-be readers, you should ask yourself a few questions:

Are you blogging as a personal journal, to share your personal opinions, to promote your business? If the first answer is yes, you needn’t worry as much about the Search Engine Optimization and marketing that will be detailed here. However, if the latter is more your reasoning, you will want to take a lot of this to heart. That, and read the SEO Factor Blog (I will be shamelessly promoting myself throughout this article, get used to it).

• What are you blogging about?

Much like the last question, you need to decide what the general theme of your blog is going to be. Are you going to use it to promote news in your industry, news and new products for your company, free tips for your readers? These are all very valid reasons to blog, but success usually comes to a blog that has this question answered early on, so think it over.

• Are you willing to write on a schedule?

This is a pretty important one. A blog is only as active as it’s writer. It’s seems to be best if you can post at a minimum of 3 times a week. There are indeed bloggers that write only once or twice a week (and they are extremely successful), stating that they will only post when it is of the highest quality, but these bloggers are not the norm. And because we will be using RSS and other promotion techniques to ensure return visitors, you will want to provide something to your readers regularly, or they might leave.

Once you have all those questions answered, you are ready. Well, let’s talk about some methods on that last answer. Again, I advocate no less than 3 posts a week. “Well, Josh,” I’m sure you are thinking, “we can’t all take time out of our days like you can just to write a little something.” And I say to you, Mr. or Mrs. WordPress Blog Optimization Article Reader, “you don’t have to stick to a ‘normal’ schedule.” Some bloggers write daily, as part of a routine they have mapped for themselves, some, again, prefer to only write when it is absolutely the best time (not my personal suggestion), and some write in bulk. “Write in bulk” you ask? My, you have a lot of questions, don’t you? Yup, write in bulk. Some of the most successful ProBloggers (that’s a hint: http://www.problogger.net/) prefer to take a chunk of their time out of their day, write 3 or 4 posts to be scheduled throughout the week, and supplement them with any news or ideas that come up during that week. This will allow you to make sure you get a few really good posts with content out of the way, and keep your busy week a little bit clearer for other obligations.

So Let’s Talk The Blog

WordPress – The SEO Friendly Blog
I have personally used a number of other blogging services; Blogger, PHPBlog, and the 2 types of WordPress. With Blogger, you will find yourself restrained with a lot of customization. And though you can place it on your domain name, the easiest option is to have them host it, which is why the majority of Blogger bloggers have a subdomain name of .blogspot.com. With PHPBlog, you get the software and can place it on your hosting, and with a little elbow grease can work a lot of the customization into the code, but it’s a little cumbersome. Add the lack of support and pre-made functions and “widgets” available with WordPress to the un-ease of use, PHPBlog leaves a lot to be desired.

With WordPress you have the option of having them host it (at wordpress.com), with the subdomain name of .wordpress.com. This will make for an amazing ease of use and customization. However, if you’re really serious about blogging, it will be best to have it as part of your domain name. You download the software and find information at http://www.wordpress.org. There is a large amount of support for the software, and the themes are always growing in number. These are the reasons that I have stopped at WordPress. I hear much about TypePad, but now I’m happy. “If it ain’t broke, don’t start over with a brand new blogging software” is what I say.

Installation
The installation of WordPress is ridiculously easy. Create a database, download it, upload it, and run the install function. That’s pretty much it. It will take you longer to wait for your hosting company to create the database than it will for you to initially install the WordPress software. You can get more details here.

Pick your theme
After you install the WordPress software, you will want to start looking for your theme of choice. You have some options here as well. You can select one of the literally hundreds of themes that have been created by others, or you can find a designer to build one for you; this will normally cost you about $500.

If you decide to pick one of the themes created already, you can start your search at the following links:

When selecting your theme, you will also want to remember the answers to those first questions I asked you. If you don’t want to make a lot of changes to the theme you pick, and you plan on using this to gain money with advertisements, then make sure there is ample room on the sidebars. This will allow for the navigation, blogroll, and any ads you want to run. Also, colors and functionality come into play. There are a few (really not many at all) that make use of iframes or frames. This would obviously cause a few problems with our optimization efforts later.

Once selected, download your theme, unzip it, upload it to the ‘themes’ labeled folder in your ‘wp-content’ folder at your host, then go into the admin panel to select it.

Setup Permalinks
OK. So we have our WordPress blog and theme setup. Now we need to make the first, and one of the most important steps; setting up permalinks. Permalinks are search engine friendly URL’s. By default, WordPress will show the URL’s to any of the pages or posts you create with session id’s. This is not a good thing. Not only for the search engine crawlers, but for marketing efforts later. They will at first look like: www.myblog.com/blah?id=3, or something like that. Instead we will want the URL’s to be reflective of the associated page. Like: www.myblog.com/about-my-blog/. This will be easier for the search engines to crawl, the URL with keywords in it will help (though it’s not much, it’s something), and will be easier for our 2-legged counterparts to read.

To set this up in WordPress, log into the admin panel and navigate to options -> permalinks. From there you can choose from a set of common setups, or customize the way the URL’s show. The rest is really up to you, but I like to have the smallest amount of variables possible.

Duplicate Content Issues
There is one more issue involved with the default setup of WordPress; Duplicate Content. This will create some problems with our rankings and indexing later on, by inducing keyword cannibalism, and will end up resulting in supplemental indexing. You see, if you post something, that post will likely be on a main page like the homepage, then have a page by itself, and will show yet again in the archives. If you have tagged the post for a certain category, it will appear there as well. Now, all these pages are fighting with each other for the rankings. As you post more, the landscape will change even further by pushing that post around, causing what is known as pagination, and then we are in big trouble.

So, what do we do? First, panic! No, wait…don’t do that. First, become familiar with these issues by reading the posts mentioned in that last paragraph. Then, download this nice plugin that will allow us to automatically create a noindex tag for the parts of the blog that cause the problem; the archives and categories pages. That’s it. All done. Well, you will still have to be mindful of any duplicate title tags. Ooh…let’s move on to that.

Title Tags
As with any website, you want the title tags to your blog and posts to be conducive to Search Engine Optimization. If you aren’t to sure on this, first read these 2 posts on proper titles, and how to effectively title pages for structuring.

• Title Tag Optimization
• How To Title Your Pages

The plugin in use can be found here. This will allow you to have titles for all your pages, posts, and even have the title automatically reflect the title of a post, which is something you will want to be mindful of while you write. The titles to your post act in 2 ways to promote your blog. First, you will want it to grab the attention of a potential reader. With RSS (we will talk about that in a sec), the title of your post is the first thing people will see. It has to be fantastical…or at least something that would get someone to read the rest of the post. Second, if you use the plugin I do, you will want to make sure that the titles of your post include some search terms. Blog posts have a funny way of grabbing links (if well written) and will show up in the search engines.

Description Tags
Yay for me! I get to direct you to another post on my blog about the description tag. And again, there is an easy way to set these up with a plugin, http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/01/05/add-meta-tags-wordpress-plugin/ allowing for both specified and automatic descriptions as you see fit. Gosh, this WordPress optimization stuff is pretty easy.

RSS
Ahhh, the almighty RSS. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is defined by the crappy, SEO hating Wikipedia as

…a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

This means that your blog will have a feed that others can place into their reader, or aggregator, and keep up with your posts from one convenient location. They can then click on the stories they want to read more on. Again, think about those titles.

As a supplement, I like to signup with FeedBurner. This will allow you to centralize your feed, making it a bit easier to promote and keep up with your stats. There are a ton of tools available through them as well, so be sure to check that out.

Blog Promotion
Again, like any other site, you will want to promote the blog using the same old methods, but are given the luxury of a few twists. There are a ton of directories for blogs and RSS feeds specifically. To save time, I’ll just link to a few posts from one of the more successful bloggers out there; Lee Odden. He has a few posts on blog and RSS directories

After getting in all those, you will be well on your way to some PR (though that won’t help a lot) and some rankings (those help).

Social Bookmarking
Now, once you start posting, you’ll want to make it easy for your readers to spread your news. You can do this by displaying various little buttons on your blog and posts, making it easy for people to Digg your post, Technorati it, Furl it, Backflip it, Reddit…it, and a whole slew of other…its.’ Again, I guess I kinda have to send you to Mr. Odden. One of the guys at TopRankBlog (Thomas McMahon) has created a great tool to help you in that matter.

Networking
Also, you will want to network with other bloggers. You will be surprised how easy it is to get another blogger to guest-post on your blog. Obviously it will give them a link, thus promoting them just a little more. You can even offer other blogger to give write an article for their blog, thus giving you the mentioned benefits. You may even land yourself a link in their blogroll.

Posting
Now the meat. We have a WordPress Blog setup, optimized, and ready to go. Now what? Well…now you blog. When writing, try to stay consistent, and try to provide good, quality posts to your readers. You don’t just want traffic, you want return readers. Remember to keep those titles pretty. And most importantly, have fun. You are now a blogger, not some kind of machine. Your readers will want to read the thoughts and views of you. Try to be light and personable (unless there is a contradicting theme for your blog, in which case you should just remember to be consistent).

Props
As a blogger, remember to give link love to your sources. People put a lot of hard work in the things they do online, and if you are using a bit of what they offer, show your appreciation by letting your readers know. It’s just good etiquette. As such, here is a small list of other bloggers that have made my blogging life a little easier, and continue to help other bloggers. So, here they are:

• TopRankBlog – Probably one of the most helpful blogs meant to provide information on promoting blogs.
• ProBlogger – As the name implies, a professional blogger showing other bloggers how to blog for money
• copyblogger – Great resource for the writing portion of your blogging efforts
• Freelance Switch – This really goes for anyone making the leap to employer free…freedom.
• Entrepreneur’s Journey – Another blog showing you how to monetize your blog.
• Blogger Design – This will help you with the design and usability aspects of your blog.

So, that’s pretty much it. For now. I’m sure this will be updated as I get questions and emails. As such, if you have any questions or see that I neglected to touch on something, let me know.

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