OK, so you have your blog set up and ready to start reaping the rewards of blog marketing. You know that you have to:
- Find a subject
- Focus on keyword density
- Write and post the blog
- Ping it to the social marketing and bookmarking sites
- Forward it to your list
Then the search engines will find your blog, move your site up in the rankings and you will get billions of visitors overnight.
OK – it doesn’t really happen overnight, but do you know that some of the settings on your blog could actually be making it take much longer? Your blog settings could actually be making it harder for you to get free traffic?
I’m going to talk about several of the problems with blog settings that you can fix so that you’re getting the most out of your blog as you can.
Permalinks
Most blogs come out of the box using numbers as part of the permalinks. i.e. www.yourdomainname.com/?p12345. Do you know what the 12345 does for Google? Absolutely nothing. You want to change this so that your keyword (which should be part of your post name) is part of the permalink. You should update your blog settings so that the name of the post replaces the 12345.
Head’s up – if you already have a blog you will need to install a plugin that will help with the transfer of old permalinks to your new SEO friendly permalinks. (Redirection 2.1.25 – John Goodley). When you view the permalink (that should now be the name of the post) you will also want to streamline it.
Search engines like compact permalinks so you should remove the generic words so that you end up with a permalink that is short and sweet, includes your keyword and makes sense if someone reads it.
Canonical URL
Did you know that search engines can sometimes see your site/blog as two different sites? If someone goes to http://www.yourwebsitename.com and someone else goes to http://yourwebsitename.com it is considered two different sites. Hopefully you know that this is a very bad thing.
Don’t you want all of your links, visitors, etc to show up on one site instead of splitting between two (even though it’s really only one site)? It’s pretty important that you fix this. One option is to use the Google Webmaster tools to tell them which site you want to use. The other option is a plugin that will do this for you. The Redirection plugin from above will do this.
Duplicate Content
Most blogs come out-of-the-box assuming that you want people to find content on your site as many ways as possible. This is great, except the search engines hate it.
If you have posts that show up under the post title but can also be found if you search by date, by author, by tag and by category it’s good for your readers but bad for the search engines. They will very likely see this as the same content showing up five times. They hate this.
If you want to keep these options available to your readers you need to update your settings to tell the search engines to not index them. A plugin called Install Robots Meta – Joost DeValk will do allow you to do this if the option isn’t available in your theme.
These are just a few of the settings you can change when you set up your blog. There are many, many more out there. Make sure you look for these. All you have to do for most of them is to make the update to your settings once and it will help your SEO automatically after that.
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