Optimizing your blog for search engines

Lately, blog optimization has been catching on like a wild fire. People have been blogging about their increase in search engine traffic due to SEO and others are starting to realize that they need to optimize their blog. There are many different ways that you can optimize your blog, but here is what I recommend doing.

URL Structure

The URL structure of your blog should filled with words and try to avoid numbers and extraneous characters. Many people like the date in their URLs, but I prefer it as domain.com/posttitle. This keeps the URL short, easy to remember and crawlable.

Page Titles

Search engines use the page titles in their search results. Most blogs have their page titles as Blog Name >> Post Title but I recommend just having the page title as the Post Title. Here is the code I use for Movable Type and WordPress.

Movable Type
<title><$MTEntryTitle$></title>

WordPress

Meta Description

Search engines usually see your content as duplicate. Granted it usually is not duplicate content, but without a unique meta description tag on each of your posts you are hampering your search engine traffic.

Movable Type
<meta name="description" content="<$MTEntryBody words="25"$> ..." />

WordPress
If you use WordPress download the head meta description plugin. Set it at 15 to 25 words. Somewhere within that range is usually fine.

Headings

The headings should represent your blog content, do not stuff tons of keywords within your headings. When using headings you have many choices, but try to use H1, H2, or H3 headings.

Section 508

Pictures and text links should have a tooltip when they are hovered over. You want to use "alt" tags on pictures and "title" tags on the text links. Make sure that the alt and title tags represent the picture or link and try not stuff irrelevant keywords within them. Here is the code for alt and title tags.

Alt
alt="enter description here"

Title
title="enter description here"

Sitemap

Most blogs do not have a sitemap and they do not need one, but it cannot hurt. You can use Google's webmaster tools to create a sitemap. This will just help the spiders index your site thoroughly and efficiently.

301 Redirect

When people link to your blog they usually link to http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com. Because of this the search engines usually see them as two separate sites and you may have 100 sites that link to http://domain.com and 50 sites that link to http://www.domain.com. If the search engines saw it as 150 links in total instead of 50 and 100 your rankings would most likely go up. You want to consolidate the links and do a 301 permanent redirect in your .htaccess file. Here is the code that I use:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^YOURDOMAIN.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Make sure the code is on 4 lines in your .htaccess file and replace "YOURDOMAIN" with your domain name.

Linking

Don't be a link Nazi. Make sure to link out to other related websites within your content; it can only help with your search engine rankings. By linking out, those sites might link back or include your blog in their blogroll. The more related incoming links you have, the higher you should rank on the search engines.

Pinging

If you want to increase your traffic you have to ping the blog search engines. You can do this through ping-o-matic or pingoat. If you use FeedBurner they also have a list of blog search engines that you can ping through them. By doing this every time you write a blog post, it will show up on search engines such as Technorati and Icerocket.

These are the things that you should do to your blog to maximize your search engine rankings. It cannot hurt to optimize your blog the right way, so give it a whirl and watch what happens to your traffic. You might see a drastic increase in search traffic or you may see little to no traffic increases. This all depends on the age of your blog and how optimized it already is, either way it cannot hurt to optimize your blog.

Enjoy the post? Here are some more that may interest you.

, August 15, 2006: “Blogs: Optimize them for search engines” — This is just placeholder content. For full discussion, follow the link.
IndikaNet Diary, August 15, 2006: “Optimasi blog untuk kepentingan search engine” — 1. URL Mengubah default URL untuk permalink dari query style menjadi /%postname%/ (Option -> Permalinks). Kita tidak perlu upload .htaccess karena wordpress akan otomatis generate file tersebut, namun kita mengalami keanehan dimana wordpress tidak mau ...
Yet another Tech Blog, August 16, 2006: “A nice Blog SEO How to” — Pronet Advertising has published a nice little tutorial on how to improve your blog’s search engine rankings. It provides short, useful, hands-on tips. Code examples are in MovableType and WordPress, so it should appeal to most bloggers out there...
Mike Stopforth, August 19, 2006: “Search Engine Optimisation for Blogs” — Ok, I know Rafiq and Miguel are the Search Engine Optimisation demigods, but I reckon I’ve beaten them to finding this nice post on SEO from Pronet Advertising (another blog with a really nice design and layout) and for that I’ll pat myself...
, January 8, 2007: “Optimizing your blog for search engines” — Some of the best ways to optimize your blog for Search Engines

Dennis, August 15, 2006

Great info. I will have to make sure I have these in place. Thanks.

Mark McLaren, August 15, 2006

Neil, Thanks for the excellent info on search engine optimization for blogs. Here is my post about a sitemap generating tool that works great and is easier to use than Google's.

Peteris Krumins, August 15, 2006

Google Sitemaps aka Webmaster Tools allows you to specify if www and non www sites are actually the same!

Neil Patel, August 15, 2006

Peteris, you would still want to do it in the .htaccess for the other search engines.

Amit Karmakar, August 15, 2006

Neil, do you have any pointers to convert existing posts from WP in the year/month/date format to domain.com/posttitle format so that people who are using the old format url dont get 404s when domain.com/posttitle comes in place? Nice article.

Neil Patel, August 15, 2006

Amit, you could do a 301 permanent redirect of each old URL (year/month/date) to each new URL (domain.com/posttitle) in the .htaccess file. It might be time consuming, but it would work.

Keith L. Dick, August 15, 2006

Thank you for sharing those great tips... I see a few I need to use...

Anshul Jain, August 15, 2006

Thanks for the tips.

David, August 15, 2006

You mention that "text links should have a tooltip when they are hovered over", however you do not practice this yourself. What gives?

Ryan Williams, August 15, 2006

One does not require the ability to direct a movie in order to criticise a movie, David. ;D

Adam, August 15, 2006

Amit, if you're using WP you may want to check out this redirect plugin.

I'm just starting to build my WP site so I don't have a long history with that plugin, but it seems to work well and you can set the redirect in the posting. Probably easier than doing it all in the .htaccess file.

Neil, thanks for the tips. I look forward to implementing them as I move my site to a new WP format.

Neil Patel, August 15, 2006

David, you are right and I should use them. There is a lot that I need to do to this blog including creating a sitemap, but I don't think I will get to any of it until we launch Crazy Egg and Serph, as well as hire a few more employees to reduce the work load.

**I just had to add the titles to these links. ;-)

Navdeep, August 15, 2006

Thanks for the nice guide. It was good to realize that I had implemented most of them in my blog :)

A.J., August 15, 2006

Adam, thanks so much for that. I just saw Neil's post about redirecting using the .htaccess, and I was wondering if there was a plugin that would make it easier for me, and boom, I saw your comment. Thanks again :D

Lokesh, August 15, 2006

Nice article Neil Patel. That was really helpful.

Neil Patel, August 15, 2006

Adam, thanks for the link to the plugin.

Michael M?�ller, August 15, 2006

Nice article, and nice blog btw! I'll be visiting soon again.

Tom Barrett, August 15, 2006

Thanks for all that! It's such a nice roundup and I shall be following them all.

seo sites, August 15, 2006

Nice info. Thanks for valuable info.

Michael Flessas, August 15, 2006

Good article Neil.

Ivan Minic, August 16, 2006

Nice, clean tips ;)

Tom4us, August 16, 2006

Thank you 4 the info. bless

milo, August 16, 2006

Thanks for this fine easy to understand list, not like many others, wich are the techie way.

Alex B., August 16, 2006

Don't forget to "hide" all not important links with rel="nofollow"

Kenny Saunders, August 16, 2006

Great article, WorkHappy just posted some good links today as well...

www.WorkHappy.net

Neil Patel, August 16, 2006

Thanks Kenny. Yea, Work Happy also linked to my Top 50 SEO Resources post.

Michael Martine, August 16, 2006

Thanks for showing the .htaccess code on that 301 redirect-very helpful! One of the most important things you can do (and one of the most difficult to accomplish because of the work involved) is to get other quality related sites to link to you. Not only that, but with the right keywords in the anchor text of the links. Whenever anyone wants to link to you, you can provide them with the exact code to do so.

Luke, August 16, 2006

Thank you for the tips, I've already implemented some of them. Very useful!

Loren Baker, August 16, 2006

That WP title code is dynOmite!

Neil Patel, August 16, 2006

Thanks Loren.

Amit Karmakar, August 16, 2006

Thanks for the link Adam. That sure would save some time!

Javier, August 17, 2006

Very useful. I'll reference a link to this post in my blog.

Keith, August 17, 2006

It is a good piece of reference. Does it really improve Search Engine Optimisation to locate a blog easier?

Hexter, August 21, 2006

Very useful and thanks for the advice :D

Mirko, August 21, 2006

Nice one.

Indrayana Tirtayasa, August 22, 2006

I am agree with your WordPress code composition of the Page Titles, that would make the page easily recognized if appeared in Google (or other search engine) search result.

Thanks you very much for the tips.

Corvillus, September 15, 2006

If you're a WordPress user, the Google Sitemap generator plugin would be my recommendation. Every time you make any changes to your blog, your sitemap will be automatically updated and Google will be pinged. If you post often, it also has the nice side effect of increasing the frequency at which Googlebot indexes your site.

Abdul Rahman, September 16, 2006

Nice articles there, Neil but do you know any plugins that is able to generate keywords for meta keyword to supplement meta description? Thanks. :D

Neil Patel, September 16, 2006

Abdul, most search engines ignore the meta keywords tag. It will not help increase your search engine rankings and I recommend not using it.

If you still want to use the meta keywords tag you can download this plugin.

John T. Pratt, September 29, 2006

This is a great article - I love to see people publishing more free information about learning search optimization for their blog. I wrote an article specifically for optimizing Drupal CMS (blog) for search engine crawlers that has been pretty well received.

If you take a look - you might want to mention here that the google sitemap is a good idea, but Yahoo! also has a similar thing called the 'urllist.txt' file that it uses as sitemap. You would not believe how much better rankings you can get in Yahoo! when you have one!

Also, writing better copy in your content, finding the best placement for your copy, and breadcrumbs (in combination with good HTML title tag, description, and H1 header tags) make the deadly combination necessary to make first page search rankings mor e possible.

great work!

GeekFX, October 1, 2006

I tried several SEO tricks to get Google to start indexing my month old blog - all in vain. It didn't happen till Copernic linked to one of my posts in their user reviews section. It definitely helps to have a big player take notice. Thanks for an informative post.

sandeep, October 18, 2006

I Totally Disagree with you Mr. Patel and all the people commenting positively on this post.

I wonder Why Darren Rowse blogged this?

P.S

Just implementing your Day 6 Tip ;-)

Neil Patel, October 18, 2006

Sandeep, test out some of the methods on your blog; you don't have much too lose. Who knows, you might see great results.

Matt, October 19, 2006

Your Section 508 section is inaccurate; if you want info to show up when you hover over something, you always use the title attribute. Images need the alt attribute for text that will be shown if the image isn't shown (e.g. a text-based web browser like Lynx).

Neil Patel, October 19, 2006