SEO for Blogs

Not only did I duplicate everything that the All in One SEO plugin does. My quick fix is actually better than the original. Rather than have these HTML statements spread all over the place in the source code, those SEO directives are now located exactly where they should be: On the very top of the source code for each web page page.

To understand exactly what I am doing, it would help if you knew something about How To Use HTML Meta Tags. In addition, this post is part of a long series of posts on Customizing Wordpress Themes. You should browse through this category of posts in sequence, starting with the first post listed for background information on how to customize Wordpress themes. The entire topic of Replacing the All in One SEO Plugin will be covered in its own series of posts.

In a correctly operating blog, new posts are updated in Google within minutes of their being published. Therefore, there is no need for a Google sitemap other than as a way to encourage Google to indexed skipped posts and blog pages.

Why are so many SEO plugins totally oblivious to SEO reality? News Flash, All in One SEO plugin, the Meta Keywords tag is dead. It died years ago. Now a days, all of the major search engines, like Google, totally ignore the Keywords meta tag.

This blog is about providing practical information that the typical blogger can actually put immediately into use.

Just because a Wordpress Theme is advertised as being Search Engine Optimized does not mean that it actually is. Usually they are selling the sizzle, rather than the steak.

WordPress blogs have an optional excerpt field that should always be filled out. Google is aware of it. Use it as an alternate description tag. Bloggers should use it as a teaser that uniquely introduces each new post without duplicating the content of the actual post.

Comments are not enough for a blog to succeed in Google. John H. Gohde’s new blog ended up getting a fair number of his posts index, but the home page of the blog ended up in the supplemental index.

Technorati has their own version of Google’s Supplemental Index, otherwise known as their blog index where no one will ever see your posts. Before Technorati will list your posts in their General Tag Index, making them visible in Google, a lot of linking building is required.

John H. Gohde has observed that a few of his SEO blog posts have received a boost from a Technorati temporary feed link. Within a month or two, John thus has good reason to believe that his new posts should be receiving a more permanent boost in the SERPS from Technorati’s main Tag directory links.