How to Make Your Blog SEO Friendly

There are a few basic things that are easy to get in the habit of doing that can make drastic differences in your search engine rankings over time. In the long run, this means more visitors, more readers, more commentors and participators, more friends, and more money! So, this stuff is absolutely worth taking a little bit of time up front to get right.

In fact, for a number of reasons, blogs are already naturally somewhat search engine friendly. Search engines like google love websites that are updated frequently, so if you post consistently and often like you should, you'll have a leg up on more static sites. Plus, blogging software like wordpress has built-in features that are meant to be seo-friendly right out of the box. However, there are tweaks you should make that will help to maximize your on-site search engine power.

I'm going to go ahead and make your SEO to do list, and then I'll walk you through each step and the reasoning behind each one.

1. Set permalinks
2. Use All in One SEO Pack
3. "Overhead" Page (sitemap, about us, etc) nofollow coding
4. Nofollow linking strategy
5. "alt" and "title" tag for images and links
6. Footer Links
7. Sidebar Linking Structure

Permalinks define the naming convention of the pages of your blog. If you are using wordpress and you go to "Settings" and then select "permalinks" you will see how they are defined now, and this is where you can change them too.

The default setting is: http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123.

This is bad because the p=123 part of the URL isn't descriptive at all. What is better to have in your url is a keyword phrase that has relevance to the page, rather than simply a random number. This isn't a huge factor, but every little bit helps.

To change this setting to default to something more meaningful, select "custom structure" and paste in: "/%category%/%postname%/". And, don't forget to hit "save changes" at the bottom after you do that.

If you've already seen my list of plugins and widgets to use for your blog, you know that the All in One SEO Pack plugin is one that is very important to use.

I cover how to download, upload, and activate the plugin on that page. You can download the All in One SEO Pack from here.

Once you have that activated, go to the "settings" tab in your wordpress dashboard, and select the All in One SEO Plugin. From here you can set all the defaults that you'd like. This will help ensure that each page or post is at last decently set for seo purposes even if you do nothing else.

The last thing to be aware of here though are for the individual pages or posts, as you write them. On the page where you write posts, if you scroll down a new "All in One SEO Pack" tab will be present. From here, you can set the title tag, meta-keywords, and meta-description. You'll want to make a habit of doing that as you write each page or post, and you'll be all set.

If any of that was unclear, you can watch the video below.

I don't want to get into a long discussion on google's pagerank now, but let's just cover one or two critical points really quick.

Pagerank is a measure assigned to each web page by google. This measure is a result of the number and quality of links from other pages that point to a given web page.

Each link effectively counts as a "vote" that increases the importance and pagerank of a page, which is one (important) factor of about 200 that impact where and if a page shows up in google's results.

Once blogs became popular in 2003-2004, people began "spamming" blogs by posting meaningless comments just to get a link back to their site. The comment added no value, except to get a link, better pagerank, and more search engine visitors to the spammer's site.

Google fought back with a new attribute called "nofollow" that could be added to any link. What this does is block pagerank from "flowing" from the source page to the page that it was linking to. In this way, all comment links from a blog could be set to "nofollow", which removed the incentive for spammers to comment on blogs.

A side effect of this was to dampen legitimate commentors from commenting, but I will cover that in my How to Get Blog Commentators page. A more positive side effect was to place in our hands a tool that we could strategically use, for the first time, to consciously dictate the flow of pagerank around our own site.

Now, we actually don't really care if ALL of our pages show up in google. These would be pages that do serve a purpose for our readers, but really only as a signal of having a quality site such as an about us page, privacy policy, terms of service, etc. These pages are outside of both the sales process and information supply, and we wouldn't necessarily want them to show up in search results.

We do want these pages to be indexed in google, in order to reflect the "quality of site", but don't need to spread pagerank to these pages. In this case, we want to strategically "nofollow" any links to them. We want ONE link going to them, to get them indexed, but other than that all links should be "nofollow".

The easiest way to do this is to link to them normally from the homepage, but "nofollow" them everywhere else. Other than this one case, we generally DO want to spread "link juice" (ie, NOT make the links "nofollow") around internally.

So, how do we do this exactly? The coding is a little more complicated than what we've had to do in other sections, but here it is:

If your blog is installed in the root directory of the domain (http://www.yoursite.com/), then put the following code in the functions.php file: (by going to "theme editor" in your blog's wordpress dashboard)

<?php function this_is_home() { $url = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]; $url_array = explode("/",$url); array_shift($url_array);

if(empty($url_array) or $url_array[0] == "") return true; } else { return false; } } ?>

If you’re editing an existing functions.php file, don’t copy the “<?php” and “?>” lines. They’ll be in the file already.

If your blog is installed in a subfolder of the domain (http://www.yoursite.com/blog/), put the following code in the functions.php file:

<?php function this_is_home() { $url = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]; $url_array = explode("/",$url); array_shift($url_array);

if($url_array[0] == "blog") return true; } else { return false; } } ?>

Replace ‘blog’ with the subfolder name where your blog happens to be installed.

Then, insert the following code in footer.php or sidebar.php where you want the sitemap link (for example) to appear.

<a href="/sitemap/"<?php if (!this_is_home()) echo " rel=\"nofollow\""; ?>>Sitemap</a>

In this example, if you put all overhead pages under a subfolder named "sitemap", the links to them will all be normal from your homepage, but "nofollow" everywhere else.

I know that may be confusing when you first read it, but that is about the simplest way I can explain it. Please post any questions you have in the comments below, and e-mail me directly as well, and I will try to clarify it for you, or even walk you through this over the phone.

This is something to keep in mind more than an explicit to do item right up front.

What I want to get across here is that you should be consciously mindful of each hyperlink you have on your blog, whether to an internal page or an external page. You should strategically plan on whether you want the link to pass on "link juice" or not.

As you saw in the previous section, there ARE times when you would not want a link to spread pagerank even to your own site (ie, an internal link). For external links, you may or may not want to send out link juice. Here are the only situations I can think of when you WOULD want to:

1. The site you are linking to is one of your own
2. The site is an authority site on your topic (this boosts credibility to your site in the eyes of search engines)
3. You are exchanging links with the owner of the site
4. You are specifically using "dofollow" for blog comments to encourage participation in your blog

Other than these 4 examples, make sure that all outbound links are set to "nofollow". Just use the tag rel="nofollow" as an attribute to these external links. I show a video of how to do that exactly below. Basically, the html on your site will look like this: <a href="www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>

This involves just a bit of coding to add to links and images that can have an impact on your search rankings, particularly if you are mindful and always remember to do this. Many webmasters simply do not do this.

For any images that you have on a particular page, within the html coding, set the attributes alt and title to contain some of the keywords that you are trying to place for in the search engines. Don't use the same exact phrase; be sure to mix it up a little. (ie, don't just blatantly "keyword stuff", that is NEVER a good idea). The text used in the alt tag will show up in browsers that fail to show the image for some reason, so be sure that the phrase makes sense.

Additionally, for any links on a page, make sure to set the title attribute = to a keyword phrase as well. Follow the same procedure here: don't keyword stuff, and change the phrase a little here so that you never use the exact same phrase.

Doing little things like this will give you an edge in the search engine results. Not a huge factor, but every little bit helps. We might as well help the search engines find us! And if you form the habit of doing this, it just takes a few extra seconds per link or image.

Below is a video on how to do this, if you unsure.

As in your sidebar, any links in the footer will be on every page of your website. That means that as your website grows, each link in the footer and sidebar will have more and more pages linking to it.

What you want to do in the footer is remove any text that is there currently (except leaving a link to the template creator's site if you'd like, but setting the link to "nofollow"). Then, choose the top 5 or so keywords you'd like to show up for, and put them there separated by " | ", and linking to your key internal pages. Make sure to have these keywords in the title of each page for additional benefit. And, if you want your homepage to show up for any of these phrases, you can even set the link to the homepage itself.

The main takeaway here is that having a strong internal linking structure will be perhaps the most important on-page factor to establish to help you on the path to having great search engine rankings. This is a significant factor that you simply cannot afford to over-look.

First off, once you've done some intensive keyword research, you should have a keyword strategy mapped out (ie, keywords sorted by daily traffic). Two great free keyword tools to start with are google's own free keyword tool, found here, and wordtracker's free tool found here. (Wordtracker also has a valuable paid research tool too that is very competitvely priced in the industry. You can get a free week trial to that here.)

In addition to those tools, you can use google insight here for free, that will give you a quick bird's eye view of important keywords and trends related to a root keyword that you supply.

Note that in many cases, you won't necessarily want to target the most highly trafficked, but general term. In many cases, you'll want to target a level or two down from that, that has less traffic, but is more highly targeted and will convert better.

Once you choose the top 10 or so keywords to target, make sure to build a page or post around each of those keywords, with the keyword used in the title, and using that keyword phrase to link to the given page, from the sidebar.

As an example, if "buy apple iphone" was one of your phrases, you should have a page centered around that phrase and including relevant content, with "buy apple iphone" included in part of the title, and linked to from the sidebar with anchor text "buy apple iphone".

That way, every one of your pages is pointing to that key page, automatically. As your site grows, so will the number of pages linking to that page.

Another quick note, when getting links from other websites, be sure to change the linking text around a little bit to mix things up. Otherwise, you risk ALL of the links pointing to a particular page using the exact same anchor text, which looks unnatural to the search engines, and for which you MAY be consequently penalized for.

Now that you have your basic on-site SEO strategy laid out and implemented, it is time to Monetize Your Blog!