The Thoughts And Ideas Of The Efficiency Coach

Four months ago I didn’t know what SEO even stood, let alone why I should spend most of my Saturday afternoon and evening sorting out my blog links for better SEO!

So let’s start at the beginning, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, what is it? Very simply it is the tasks, design or processes which enable your website to appear higher up the search engine’s rankings for your chosen keywords. Well it sounds simple doesn’t it? Do the right things and you will pop out on the first page of google’s results? Well, no actually. If 500 people want to be the top ranked site in google for a keyword, someone has to be first and someone has to be last.

A blog is a great way of encouraging people to visit your website (drive traffic in web speak). What you may not know is that a blog is also an excellent way of increasing your SEO.

Now, I am not a technie, so anything that I recommend to help you improve your SEO with your blog – will not require any knowledge of coding! Plus, I have learnt it the hard way…

1. Bring it in house

By this I mean, make sure your blog is hosted within your website. If you don’t have your blog hosted within your website, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend optimising your blog for SEO, it wouldn’t matter one iota…

Wordpress offers its blogging software for free for you to install into your website domain. The installation doesn’t require you to have much knowledge about servers, coding… but it will probably take you longer than the stated ‘famous’ 5 minute installation.

2. What’s important to you?

You need to identify what keywords are important to you. As much as possible these keywords need to appear, in decreasing level of importance:

Blog title, permalinks (the URL used to get to individual blog posts), tags and blog content.

3. Craft your permalinks

Wordpress by default gives you a permalink (or URL) for each post as something very similar to this: http://yourdomain.com/blog/?p=123. For good SEO you need to add in keywords to your permalink URL.

If your domain is hosted on a linux server, then this is what you need to type in the custom box in permalink settings: /%year%/%category%/%postname%.

If your domain is hosted on a windows server, then you need to type in /index.php/%year%/%category%/%postname%

Ideally keep your permalinks as short as possible – as the google robots prefer not to have to dig deep into the site.

If you do change your permalinks, then you need a very nifty plugin called Dean’s permalink migration. What this plugin does, is everytime someone clicks on an old link for a post, the plugin will automatically direct them to the new link. Thus saving you lots of broken links and annoyed google robots… Very simply change your permalinks, then activate the plug in and type in the old permalink structure. If this was the default wordpress permalink, then just type in /.

4. Categorise

Choose blog categories that contain important keywords to you. Then include the category name in your blog permalink.

5. Tag it!

Don’t skimp on your tags for each blog post. Make sure the tags are relevant to your blog content

6. Update regularly

To increase or just maintain your Google page rank you must regularly refresh or add more (and relevant!) content to your website. Google prefers dynamic content – i.e. a blog to static content (a page with .htm or .html file extension)

7. Measure it

There are some great wordpress plugins (Google Integrator toolkit, Google Analyticator) which enable you to integrate google analytical for your wordpress blog.

8. Promote your blog

The more people that link to your blog the better it is for your google page ranking. (so feel free to link to my blog…)

9. Increase keyword density in your posts

Google now has very sophisticated ways of determining keywords for your site – and actually looks for keywords within the content of the site – not just the meta tags.

Anyway, that’s it for a while. But if you could do with some help to increase your personal or business efficiency – why not give us a call?

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