Optimizing Blogs for Searchengines
My blog in this form is now a little bit over 40 hours old and I already made several mistakes with regards to our friends: the search engines. There are several good articles and presentations that I would recommend for reading: try this, this and this. So here are some of the basic rules you should follow when creating a blog:
- Keep the link to the articles simple and nice. With Wordpress this is called Permalink and you can choose different formats. There is only one format that really makes sense: /%postname%/ This is just the title of your post (no dates, categories etc. needed). Important: Once your blog has been online for a certain while never change the link format again!
- Get your titles optimized! The standard titles of most blogs are something like “My new blog >> Article title”. This is just not good when looking at your article as the result of a search request on Google or some other search engine. If you are using Wordpress you can use this plugin to change the way titles are presented and even specify unique titles for each blog entry.
- Change the main title of your blog… “Tobman’s Blog” doesn’t tell Googlebot or other spiders much about the content to expect. When you go to my homepage and have a look at the title you will see that I have changed it in order to more clear on what to expect on this blog. You can use the plugin mentioned above for this task as well.
- Get a Sitemap and submit it to Google! I used this plugin to create an XML sitemap and also to automatically submit the sitemap to Google and MSN.
As a sidenote: I have not followed those rule from the beginning - unfortunately. I thought to have content first is more important and then do the search engine optimization. Well, I would say this was a mistake, as I had to change the paths to my blog entries and this will definitely lead to some 404 errors…
Another thing that really annoyed me was the fact that I had linked from one of my blog entries to some others several times - all those links were broken after changing the permalink layout of course. So I was wondering - is there a better way to link within blog entries? Well, no not really. As described in the docs you can either use peramlinks or linking to the id of the blog entries. When you link to the id’s it does not matter when the permalinks change, but it’s not very pretty:
<a href="index.php?p=123">Post Title</a>
And also you have to look up the id number of the post… So basically I would suggest sticking to permalinks and just not changing them once their structure is set! But if anyone knows a more elegant solution (e.g. a plugin) I’d be really interested to know!