Maximize Your WordPress Blog

Posted on July 12, 2005

Blogs are quickly flooding the marketplace, making it a bit more difficult to get the same great positioning results in the search engines than we’re used to seeing.

Don’t get me wrong, blogs are still a hot tool for both website management and search engine positioning, but if you want to come out on top of the heap you’ll have to work a bit harder on your strategy.

It’s easy if you have a guide and the tools…

“Currently a newly registered website, WordPress blog installed and posted to daily, with a keyword marketing strategy defined, can get listed and start topping the charts in under a month. Of course a lot rides on how fierce and dedicated your competition is…”

If competition for your chosen market is fierce you can fight back and win with a few simple techniques, modifications to your WordPress blog, and one extra minute per post.

The strategy and modifications I’m talking about are:

adding keywords and descriptions to every post - What do you think that will do to your search engine rankings?
increase ping sites - Add only the busiest ping services…
set up permalinks - There’s a good way and a better way…
editing the generic templates that come with WordPress - They’re not really optimized for Search Engines!

Plus one of the most important time savers…

Posting your pre-written content to your blog at specified times and dates.

Here’s where this modification really comes in handy…

Thinking of going on holiday and you’re a little wary of using an automated poster (scraped RSS Feeds from other sources) on your blog?
Or do you have a number of blogs on varying topics and you’re tired of changing hats throughout the day providing fresh content to each blog?

It’s easy to set up on WordPress if you have the plug-in.

Here’s how it works…

Gather your content, specify the date and time you want each article to be posted, and turn on the plug in.

My friend and fellow marketer David provides the plug in and walks you through the steps in his report “Top WordPress Tricks”, he also provides the tools, files and walkthroughs for the other modifications mentioned above (adding keywords and descriptions, permalinks and optimizing for the search engines), plus quite a few more tricks you can have up your sleeve to make sure your WordPress blog gets to, and stays at the top of search engine results.

Read more about the WordPress modifications, plug-ins and optimizations here.

P.S. When you get to the site you’ll find David talks quite a bit about using these techniques for niche blogs. In my opinion all of our blogs are niched (they have focus and are reaching out to a specific audience). Even if your blog’s content is broad and varied, if you want to be found in the top search engine results you’ll want to read what David has to offer!

P.S.S. You may notice that I only have a few of these techniques set up on this blog. It’s a time thing. This has been my last blog to update with the modifications. (I just finally upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.3!) Too many projects on the go, but within the next month you will see that I incorporate each and every one of David’s suggestions in this blog.

Bookmark / Tag It! Stumble It!