SEO Basics for Blogs

Anyone who runs a website or a blog quickly learns the importance of
traffic from search engines. While SEO basics are becoming common
knowledge for designers and marketers, blogs face different issues with
search engines than traditional websites.

With blogs you have less control over the coding that is used.
Depending on what blogging platform you are using, you are probably
typing directly in an internet browser to add a new post. The program
then generates the coding. Most modern blogging programs have been
designed to create blogs that are built with search engine-friendly code. However, some control is lost for the blogger.

There are a few areas that can often be troublesome for bloggers who are attempting to optimize for search engines.

1 - URL Structure

Most blogs create URLs that contain a lot of random characters, like
question marks, and no keywords or anything of value. A page will rank
higher in search engines when its URL contains words or phrases that
are part of the search. Therefore, getting keywords in your URL is
important. In addition, many search engines won’t index pages that have
auto-generated URLs, like the standard blog post page.

What can you do to have URLs that are more search engine-friendly?

Some blogging programs allow you to choose what type of URL (or permalink) you want to be created. For WordPress
users, from your dashboard click on “options” and then “permalinks.”
From here you will have 3 standard choices, plus the option to create
your own custom permalink structure. For this blog we have entered the
following in the custom textfield, “/%category%/%postname%/”. This
tells WordPress to create permalinks that include the category of the
post followed by the name of the post. Feel free to use this for your
blog, or see some other ideas at The Undersigned and at Geek Notes.

2- Page Titles

One of the most important on-page factors for search engine rankings
is the page title. Unfortunately, many bloggers do not change their
page titles. In WordPress you can standardize how you want your page
titles to appear by editing some code in the header.php file. Open up
header.php and look for the title tag. The code between the title tags
is what you want to edit. For this blog we use the following code:

This will create page titles that start with the name of the post and
end with the name of the blog. Alternatively, you can get the SEO Title
Tag plugin http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/ that will
easily allow you to create titles for your posts and pages.

For Movable Type users, the page titles can be changed on the settings tab. Blogger users can get more information from Control Your Title Tags in Blogger.

3 - Duplicate Content

No search engine likes to see duplicate content. Whether it is two
pages on the same site with the same information or multiple pages on
different sites with essentially the same information or content, the
results can include pages being cast into Google’s supplemental index
rather than the main index. Duplicate content is a major issue for
blogs, as category pages and calendar/date pages often cause search
engines to find the same content on multiple pages.

There are a few ways for bloggers to overcome duplicate content
issues. One method is to use the robots.txt file to instruct search
engines on which pages should be ignored, leaving just the primary
pages to be indexed. For more information about creating a robots.txt
file for blogs, and to see an example, visit Not So Boring Life.

Another option for WordPress users is the Duplicate Content Cure plugin.

You can also control how much content appears on your categories pages
by choosing to have those pages display only the beginning of posts
rather than the entire post. In this case the reader would click
through to the main post page to read the entire article and search
engines may not recognize the category page as having duplicate
content. WordPress users can do this by editing the archive template.
If you are using the default Kubrick theme, open archive.php and look
for . Change “content” to “excerpt” and that’s it.

4 - Meta Tags

When designing a traditional, static website you have the
option/ability to enter meta tags (descriptions and keywords) for each
page. Although these tags a less influential on search engine rankings
as they used to be, it doesn’t hurt to have them in your pages.
However, most blogging programs do not give the user the option to add
meta tags when writing a post.

For WordPress users the Add-Meta-Tags plugin will allow you to enter meta tags for any page.

Movable Type users should see the article from Anders Jacobsen and the article from Miles Evans. Blogger users should see the article from ORblogs.

While this is just a quick summary, these are the most important SEO
topics that bloggers will face (as compared to those issues faced by
traditional websites). By understanding the unique qualities that a
blog has in comparison with a static website and knowing what options
and resources are available, you can create a blog that is ready for
search engines.

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