Here are some tips for making your blog more search-engine friendly.
Titles
Use keywords in the titles of your Posts and your Pages. Put the most important words first, then use punctuation to include the rest of the title. See the title of this post. It’s a little awkward, but, you and the search engines understand. (The WordPress plugin, SEO Title Tag comes highly recommended).
Posts
You already know to use your keyword terms within each post. To strengthen those keyword terms, use name-value pairs. For example,
“Blog developers like Adventures Online produce…” and
“As blog developers Adventures Online produce…”
- Name = “blog developers”
- Value = “Adventures Online”
“An experienced travel agent, Linda Tatten has…” and
“Linda Tatten, an experienced travel agent, has…”
- Name = “experienced travel agent”
- Value = “Linda Tatten”
Outbound Links
When linking to other websites, add the “nofollow” directive so that the search engines will know that the content that follows is not related to your site. To learn more about this, see the searchenginewatch.com article, Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links.
- First add the link.
<a href="http://www.othersite.com> other website</a> - Then make the link open in another window.
<a href="http://www.othersite.com target="_blank"> other website</a> - Then tell the search engines not to follow the link.
<a href="http://www.othersite.com target="_blank" rel="nofollow">
Archives Pages
To avoid having your original content mistaken for duplicate content (which the search engnines do not like):
- Use meta data to tell the search engine bots to not index the page nor follow the links on the page.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
Tag Clouds
Use the built in tags or add a tag cloud plugin/widget to add keyword terms to categorize each post. Here’s a search at WordPress for tag cloud plugins.