PluginID’s The Blogging Blueprint- A Practical Application Guide. Part 5: Website Traffic & Search Engine Optimisation

You can write the best blog content in the world, but it’s a waste of time if nobody is going to find it. The “build it and they will come” theory does not apply to blogging. Instead, you need to actively work to increase the number of visitors your site receives.

And Glen, of PluginID’s The Blogging Blueprint should know. He built his first website in his early teens.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the allusive dragon of blogging; it’s so big, so powerful, so important and yet can remain unseen, but if you’re clever you can capture it. Oh so I’ve been lead to believe.

As Glen puts it:

[it] is the ‘art’ of getting more traffic to your website via search engines. There are two main aspects to SEO; on-site and off-site. On site refers to the changes you can make to your own pages to make them more friendly. Off-site refers to building links from other sites.

In his ebook Glen goes into detail about how to improve the on-site SEO for your website. The changes I’ll implement from this will be on my new site rather than here because my focus herein is getting that site up and running before I launch it but in a way that you can actually watch it happen and do it yourselves.

Site and Post Titles

Glen states that the most important aspect of on site optimisation is the site and post titles, it’s difficult to refute this because titles are one of the main things that search engines use. However he also states:

By default, the post titles for WordPress are a little bit ugly. They include your site name, some funny looking arrows (>>) and then the title of your posts.

Here he loses me. What is he referring to? I do a little digging and still don’t uncover what he’s looking at. He does say though that this one step is the one step we ought to follow if we do nothing else so that speaks volumes of its importance.

He outlines that the steps to follow:

Log into your WordPress Dashboard and find the ‘Appearance‘ option on the left hand side. Under that you will see an option for ‘Editor‘ which you should choose. Next, locate the header.php file and you should see something like: <title>lotsofrandomstuffhere</title>

Now what you want to do is change the content inside the title tag with some optimised PHP code, like so: <title><?php if(is_home()) { echo ‘Homepage title here‘; } else { wp_title(”) ;} ? ></title>

When I do this, and because I am using the Modern theme, I see: <title><?php wp_title(”); ?><?php if(wp_title(”, false)) { echo ‘ |’; } ?> <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title> What I’m reading in my code is three different commands, rather than the one that Glen has. This leads me to wonder why.

And here I have my first piece of coding to comprehend. Geez, I’d like to be overwhelmed but thanks to the good graces of google I found this site to teach me: Create a Free Website: HTML Tutorial.

For the sake of this post I’m actually not going to change the coding that FlexiThemes have provided for the header.php, even though I’m going against Glen’s good advice I’m going to assume that the original code is longer for a reason and will wait until I understand more before I go stumbling around like a drunk at the Full Moon Festival.

Permalinks

A permalink is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or the address you type to locate a specific post on a website. For example, this website’s URL is http://www.fromwhoatogo.wordpress. com. From my home page you will see only the main URL but if you click on the posts heading you will see the URL change: http://www.fromwhoatogo.wordpress.com/pluginids-blueprint-part5.

It’s important that, like the title of the post, the permalink is clear and concise. It should reflect the title of the post and should not have too much unnecessary information.

In the WordPress Dashboard go to Settings and then Permalinks and change the Custom Structure to /%postname%/

Sitemap

A sitemap is just that, a map to your website. It is a single page stuffed to the rafters of links to the most important pages on your website.

Sitemaps are useful for both search engine spiders who visit your site and human visitors. Search engines can only find other pages on your site if you link to them; they don’t have special access or tricks to just guess the locations of your pages. Humans will also benefit; you can list all of your categories, your most popular posts, and pages they can use to find more about you or the products/services you offer (if any). To create a sitemap, all you have to do is add a new page to your site via the WordPress Admin [Dashboard].

I’ve been using something like a sitemap herein for a long time and called it my Portfolio because I have other work on the go and I wanted my website to house the locations for all of my work. Being location independent isn’t just about being an Online Business Developer, and nor is my site, so I don’t want the focus of who I am, or my personal brand, to reflect just one place I work.

A sitemap is easy to set up but it can take a long time and fiddling around. I recommend having a look at some big name websites (or simply websites in your industry/ field) and seeing how they arrange themselves, the categories they use and layout. In this way you’ll come to understand what will and will not work for you.

An important thing to remember about a sitemap is to keep it updated, that means every time you post you have to update it too. Also make sure that all the links remain current, especially if you are linking to sites external to your website, like I do with my magazine work.

Archives or Categories

The house in which your old posts live come in two styles: date and category. The date depends on when you post and the category is set by you when you create your post. Both humans and search engines filtering through your site will look for information in these places.

Glen recommends only having one of the two displayed on your site:

I say to only choose one because I believe having both gives away too much ‘link juice’ and one page that has links to your older articles is enough. I also prefer to show blog categories rather than archives.

I agree that one is enough and that categories do work best. In my Portfolio (sitemap) I list all my posts in order so it is not necessary to have a date archive, people will see the order of posts clearly enough and the importance should be on what not when.

Interlinking

Linking to other sites in your posts is important for a couple of reasons:

1. You’re giving recognition where it’s due (read: plagiarising sucks!);
2. You’re letting those websites know you’re using their work, which is great from a personal branding point of view;
3. You’re demonstrating to your readers what resources you use;
4. You’re letting the search engines go to town on your link-loving, which gets your site more attention.

No Follow Sculpting

No-follow sculpting is basically the process of keeping the link-juice of your site going to only your most important pages. Think of your site like a funnel. If your homepage has 1,000 links from other, relevant websites then it will be thought of as a strong page. If you link to other pages from your homepage, these pages will get a little bit of that ‘strength,’ that ‘authority.’ Figuratively speaking, of course.

I hard code a lot of the links in my blog theme, and by that I mean I write the HTML myself and don’t let some PHP code automate the process. Because of this, I can add the no-follow attribute to any links I want. This attribute was created so that search engines can detect spam or pages which don’t deserve a flow of pagerank, and you’ll find that it is applied to blog comments on the majority of sites. The types of pages I no-follow include most sidebar links, my about page and my contact page. These pages are purely there for on-site visitors and I don’t need them to rank highly in search engines.

It makes sense that you really only want to draw attention to certain parts of your site but unfortunately Glen does not explain how to do this. Hard coding the HTML sounds very fancy and it’s a shame he doesn’t explain what to do here. Like the title code I’ve added no-follow sculpting to my list of HTML stuff to learn. I’m going to guess not for a little while though.

www Redirect

Have you ever opened up a site and although you’ve typed http://www.fromwhoatogo.com you’ve been taken to http://fromwhaotogo.com? This is the redirection taking place. It is the task of setting up your website to load whether you type www or not just so you can get as much attention as possible.

In my case it’s been done for me, not that I know how. I’m guessing it was automatically done through my website’s host Hostgator but Glen does provide links and information in his ebook on how to do it if you need to.

Key Words

What Glen doesn’t go into detail about is how important SEO is within a post. In a section he calls, What Not to Do, he says:

I also recommend that you don’t write solely for search engines; your blog should be all about the readers. If you are creative you’ll find some way to include the keywords you are targeting into a post title without it looking spammy. If you simply want to include your keywords all over the place and make your text unreadable then you probably aren’t in blogging to build up a reader base. Or, at least, you shouldn’t expect to build one.

And he’s right but I still think it’s important to be aware of the language you use within a post. It’s reasonably easy to do if you’re writing about topics that you need specific key words for, just don’t go overboard and use them fifty million times.

Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t have to be something you love but keeping it in the back of your mind when you post will help build recognition for the work you’re doing and make finding you a lot easier.

Have you got tricks of the trade you use to make it easier?

Missed the Beginning?

• Part 1: Getting the Blog Ball Rolling
• Part 2: Setting up a Hosting Service
• Part 3: WordPress & All that Jazz
• Part 4: Theme’s Are Mean