3 SEO Tips To Rock Your Blog

January 9,2008

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3 SEO tips you can definitely do with

Note: Some of the following tips were mentioned in the 7 Detailed Ways to Improve Blog.

More Effective Titles

Undoubtedly, and you will also agree, that titles are the most important SEO factor for any website. Therefore, it makes sense to optimize them the best for maximum benefit.

The question that arises here is, what is the best title composition? Should you include the blog’s name before the actual page’s title? Should you include the blog name in the title at all? These are only some of the questions that haunt many bloggers who set out to optimize their titles. Also, many can’t work out how to make the title dynamic. Read on.

According to me, your titles should contain first and foremost the keywords of the current page (This could be the title of your post, perhaps), and as little as possible of everything else. Anything extra dilutes the SEO effect of you titles. Of course, the home page’s title should contain the name of your blog, optionally followed by the tagline.

What makes it a lot easier to optimize your titles is to use a dynamic script to set the title. For example, it should set the title to something if the page is the home page, but to something else if the page is a post page, and so on. Now all the code is in one single piece of script and you don’t need to do unnecessary work.

The best dynamic title generation code that I’ve bumped into is that used by the free Cutline theme. Simple and effective:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title(”,true); } else { bloginfo(’name’); echo(’ — ‘); bloginfo(’description’); } ?>

Put the above code between the <title></title> tags. It’s operation is simple:

First, it checks if the current page is a (single) post page, or a normal page or an archives page. If so, it sets the title to the title of the post. And nothing else. However, if the current page is not any of these three, then the title is set to the name of the blog, followed by a right double angled-bracket (—) and then the tag line, or the description of your blog.

The above was the most minimalistic you can possibly get with your titles. And its the best for SEO too. But what you (and me too) might not like is that the blog name is not included with the title on single, page and archives pages. This is bad if you’re after branding your blog. Your blog name should be there on every page’s title. SO, just do a little tweaking of the above code! :

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title(”,true); bloginfo(’name’);} else { bloginfo(’name’); echo(’ — ‘); bloginfo(’description’); } ?>

What we just did here is that we added the thing in blog after the wp_title(”,true); thingie. What it obviously does is that it adds the name of your blog after the title. Simple as that.

Change that ‘Home’ to ‘[blog name]‘

I mentioned this in the 7 Detailed Ways to Improve Blog also. Many blogs, maybe yours too, use the word ‘Home’ as the link text in the link to the home page. Look where the page navigation is and you will see that ‘Home’ text blurting out at you.

This is a wasted SEO opportunity. The word ‘Home’ has no value in the eyes of the search bot. It’s not related to your blog in anyway, is it? You shouldn’t be using it then!

What if you replaced that ‘Home’ with the name of your blog? That would have a lot more worthiness in the eyes of the search engine, since it’s related a whole lot to your blog(Heck, it’s your blog’s name!). Look at this blog for example

So, change all those HOME links to your blog’s name and then notice the positive SEO effect it has.

The Importance of Clean Code

Ever taken a look at the back end of your blog? I mean, the code? Search engine bots don’t look at the design of your site, they can’t understand it at all. They travel through your blog through the code. The code is their road and they the cars. Just as you get stuck on the road and can’t go further if something blocks the whole thing, discrepancies in the code are huge obstacles for search spiders. Don’t let that happen. Make sure you close all opened tags and nest them properly. Also, stick to the standard of HTML you are using; don’t become a radical and make up your own standard.

Use a validation tool to discover errors in your code. The best of them around is W3C’s Validator.

The positive results are worth the effort you make. Search engines will thank you for this effort for placing you higher in the rankings!

Do YOU have any tips you feel could make it to the above list?? If yes, please let the rest of us know!