Maximize social web and SEO-friendliness of your new self-hosted WordPress blog
| Submitted by Bala Gopalan on Tuesday, 25 August 200916 Comments
I helped a family member get going on WordPress, basically move from hand-coded HTML setup on DreamWeaver to set up, configure, publish & manage from a self-hosted WordPress for his career blog site – www.amalbala.com. New version of the site is not officially v1.0 yet. As we were finetuning his site, I sent a few pointers to him by e-mail that I thought made even more sense published as a blog post. So here it is below, using the www.amalbala.com (as of 08/24/09) site as reference:
- Add something to your HTML title “the district”. Like “the district // home of amal bala” or whatever makes sense. Presently, title (“the district”) is too generic for SEO friendliness. Nice to have: create a favicon for your site using free services such as Dynamic Drive – FavIcon Generator or favicon.ico Generator.
- Install All-in-One SEO pack plugin for Wordpress
- Make it a point to write an “excerpt” for all your posts inside the WP edit-post screen. Very important for SEO and mashups with Facebook etc
- Make it a point to to populate the fields (keywords, etc) under the All-in-One SEO module for each post. You can choose the dynamically generate keywords option
- Get a Twitter account and install a Twitter plug-in so that all your posts are automatically tweeted when you publish or update. Better, if you can publish with a hashtag. If your Twitter account is mashed up with your Facebook account even better. Your distribution improves many folds.
- Twitter plugins I use are Twitter for WordPress and Tweetly Updater. Former pulls in Twitter feed into my blog in the form of a sidebar widget while the latter can be configured to automatically tweet whenever you publish a blog post.
- Add a “Stay Connected” widget to summarize your various Social Media profiles. See this for icons you can use — http://www.instantshift.com/2008/12/10/20-free-social-media-icon-sets-for-bloggers/
- www.instantshift.com seems to be a nice site for web designers and developers. You will see lots of useful pointers there. Nice to have: you can increase the coolness of your blog with this WordPress plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/. It allows you to display your tags and categories as a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D.
- Get a Google Analytics account (you can register with your gmail account). Install this plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/ – to integrate with Google Analytics. Track your site! If you need realtime tracking, you can try a Freemium service such as StatCounter as information from Google is delayed by a day.
- Add social bookmarking tools to your blog. Try Share This.
- Add a Blog Roll section to your site. List only those blogs that are valuable to you and you want to connect and back link with. Do not dilute yourself
- Start commenting on meaningful external blogs with linkbacks to your site. You have to do it subtly (and not overtly) so that it does not look like shameless plugs
- See if this tool – http://www.wibiya.com/ – makes sense for you. Try out such new social tools, plug-ins, etc. Blog about your experience if you can. My own example here — http://www.inderstadt.net/2008/12/06/inderstadt-a-complete-makeover/
- Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for Wordpress. This will improve search engine indexing of your site.
- Burn the RSS feed of your blog through FeedBurner. Google owns FeedBurner now and I say it is beneficial to have your feed aggregated by this service.
- Get your blog listed on directories such as Technorati and BlogCatalog. See this blog’s listing on Technorati and BlogCatalog.
- ENJOY!
Hope someone finds the above useful ;=)
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Most people do not realize that it is possible to publish back-dated posts on WordPress. Case in point:
The vault section of our example site is presently (08/25/09) a monolithic blob — even though it actually contains more than 70 “posts”.
What does this mean: (a) it makes the site’s content look more lean than it actually is .. which for a blogging site is not that good (b) it prevents visitors from commenting or sharing specific posts.
My recommendation of breaking the vault section into individual back-dated posts is presently being worked upon. Since we are on WordPress, this should not take too long to address and would be time well spent!
How to Publish back-dated posts on WordPress?
Under “Edit Post / Publish” module on the RHS top, there is a line that says something like “Published on Aug 25, 2009 @ 12:16 Edit”. Click on the Edit link to set your post’s date to some date in the past. Remember to click on “Update Post” finally!
I am unclear as to why you want to back date the post. I understand how to do it but just dont understand the reasoning.
Julia – to clarify, I am not suggesting arbitrarily back-dating posts. Or, cooking up posts for a past date.
In the example of http://www.amalbala.com, he used to have a blog-like site that was maintained through Dreamweaver (and static HTML). You can check out http://www.amalbala.com/blog/ to see what I am talking about. This page contains a dump of the previous version of the site, however, as one static, large dump of almost 70 posts or so. Here, he did not realize that he could take each “post” and publish it with its exact date (in the past) on WordPress. So the result is the dump that we see.
Now, if he had published the above 70 different (backdated) WP posts, the “weight” of his blog would have increased. The Blog Feed (RSS) will have ~75 items instead of the 3-4 items it has now. This has implications when it comes to mashups and aggregations. Tools or services that do this look at what the frequency of posting is for a particular blog and since when a blog has been active. Compare stats of 3-4 posts per month since Jun 2008 as opposed to 3 posts per month since Aug 2009. Obviously, the former puts u in a better position.
I believe factors such as the above do affect the worthiness of a blog as how search engines, blog registries (such as technorati) and aggregators (Feed Burner) see it. And, this will impact SEO.
Let me know if the above still does not answer your question.
Thanks for the great information. I just recently started 2 blogs for my business. I am just learning some of the many ways to enhance my blog site. Your suggestions are just what I need for the next level.I just put the SEO pluggin on but have not been filling it our completely.
in a future post I would like to know how to do the trackbacks
Hey, this is great! Ive been looking for articles on this subject. thanks for the upload.
thanks for the infomation on your article i really appreciate it.. keep it up
Excellent post! I fould these steps very helpful and practical when weaving the social web into my WordPress blog. I’m going to use some of these SEO tips in practice right now and will share the results. Stay tuned…