Your blog is an important part of your business, so why not optimize it with the rest of your site? You’d be surprised by how many people, even big names in SEO, don’t fully optimize their blogs. I’m obviously not the first to write on this topic, but I have some of my own ideas for quickly optimizing your blog, in 5 minutes or less. These are all WordPress Plugins, but certainly applying this to your own blog type would be great for your SEO.
1) Alinks
Lee Odden suggests using a keyword glossary for your blog, and this plugin takes that one step further and combines it with intralinks. Intralinks is an SEO strategy that shows emphasis on important content of your site by “intralinking” to those pages more often (and with related anchor text). This plugin does it automatically for you. Not only does it help with SEO, but your readers may find more articles in your blog that way. Alinks does have one limitation: it is only intra-blog. If anyone knows of another plugin that lets you put in a keyword and be able to choose your own URL, let me know!
2) Increase Blog Comments: Show Top Commentators
By showing top commentators, you can motivate people to post on your blog because they can get/stay in the top commentators list and have a link to their site. One of the great things about Web 2.0 is “user-generated content”. Web 2.0 sites wouldn’t survive without it, because all they are really doing is providing a platform to let the world speak in different ways. Your blog gets content from you, but also from your commentators. Think of the amount of content that Matt Cutts gets on his blog, even after just posting 54 words. His 54 words turned into over 10,000 words on one page…now that’s user-generated content. I’ve seen search engine snippets pull directly from comments even.
3) Increase Blog Comments: Subscribe to Comments
Although this plugin doesn’t directly affect your SEO, it can keep readers coming back and contributing to ongoing discussions within your comments. Like the top commentators blog, your users can help create content along with you. Of course, you’ll need to kick it off with some really good content.
4) Ultimate Tag Warrior
This plugin extends the ability of the categories part of your blog. You can do a lot of things with the tagging, such as tag clouds and go out to technorati and de.licio.us. I haven’t played much with it, but I know there are a lot of blogs that use it.
5) Related Entries
This is a very traditional one, but one that I don’t see nearly enough on blogs. I love being able to see entries that are related to what I am reading, and I like it right after a post because that’s where my eyes are. We saw a huge increase in the number of people reading more entries in our blog as soon as we added this feaure.
6) Add meta tags
So meta tags have a bad rap, but certainly they’re not something to just disregard completely. Even Vanessa Fox of Google has said you should have description meta tags. This module makes it super easy. There are other plugins for meta tags that even let you write your own custom description for each post, which is the best way to do it, in my opinion.
In 5 minutes or less you can download and install these plugins, and be one step closer to better SEO for your blog and website. If you have other plugins you like, use, or recommend, please comment on them and we can grow a list together.
