5 Quick And Easy Basic SEO for blogs

[narendra.s.v]

Here i have 5 basic seo for blogs which are quick and easy:

Create a sitemap.
Use Meta Keywords and Meta Content.
Use Valid HTML and CSS code.
Make your blog load fast.
Use Alt and Title tags for Images.

1. Create a site map.
You can easily create a site map using the following plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

2. Using Meta Content and Meta Keywords.
The use of proper keywords and content relate to your web site, which will helps search engines to crawl your blog.

3. Using Valid HTML and CSS code.
Validate your html and css code and make your code w3c standard.

http://validator.w3.org

validate your css code here

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator

4. Make your blog load fast.
A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

For this install a caching plugin called WP-Super-Cache (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/), it is a bit of work to install, but that will make your blog an lot faster.

5. Using Alt and Title tags for Images.
Add keywords related to the images and your blog using alt tag. Because images you have placed on site can be seen by visitors but not by the search engines, so alt tag help search engines to understand. So that they can be displayed in the image results.

Helped?! Shoot a Thanks :)

[ap4a]

I agree with #1 and #3, and the sentiment behind 4. But definitely not 5. Alt attributes are intended for human use, not SEO. The descriptions used should provide an indication of what the image is when the image itself can't be seen - whether that's due to the image failing to load, the user browsing with images off or with a text only browser, or if the user is vision impaired. It's considered so important that the most basic accessibility requirement recommended by the W3C is to include appropriate alt attributes. Doing so helps users, it'll also have the side effect of helping SEO - but targeting SEO only will lead to poor and irrelevant alt text, that doesn't aid your visitors, being chosen.

If you read the Google webmaster guidelines you'll see that they also suggest that you write for your visitors and not for search engines, and they quite strongly frown upon the practice of stuffing keywords into alt and title attributes.

[navjotjsingh]

Even Meta Keywords nowdays don't help with rankings in major search engines. Just keep writing great content is the only mantra to rank good in search engines. A Site with no text and keywords and proper meta text will still not rank good in search engines against a site which has lots of content but almost nil meta tags.

[akira07]

all you mentioned is opt-in page, right?

[navjotjsingh]

all you mentioned is opt-in page, right?

Can you explain what do you mean by it?

[narendra.s.v]

Even Meta Keywords nowdays don't help with rankings in major search engines. Just keep writing great content is the only mantra to rank good in search engines. A Site with no text and keywords and proper meta text will still not rank good in search engines against a site which has lots of content but almost nil meta tags.
these are just BASIC SEO TIPS and not a pro!

all you mentioned is opt-in page, right?
they are for blogs

[sarahG]

1. A Sitemap for a blog isn't necessarily a great idea. My blog has over 700 posts, I'd hate to see the sitemap for that. A sitemap is better suited to a business site as opposed to a blog. Usually, if you've allowed the spiders in when you first started up your site, they'll already be spidering your content. Deep linking from new posts eg. using the relevant posts plugin, is a way of getting a new post (which the spiders will crawl all over) to help push them through to older posts again.

You could create a sitemap of your pages and categories, but most sites already have these linked from the front page anyway so there's no point duplicating it. Providing you're pinging all the correct sites when you write a post, the spiders will index each and every post you write.

If you change your blog structure or domain then a sitemap may potentially help, but that's about the only time I'd say to have one.

2. Meta Keywords and Description will not benefit your site from an SEO purpose. If you choose to use them then make sure you use them correctly else you could cause your site a problem in search engines. Rule of thumb with the metas, it's better not to use them than use them wrongly. That said, Metas were created for a reason, and that wasn't for search engines, so a unique description and set of keywords per page is fine and using the meta for what it was intended for.

3. Valid HTML and CSS is always the best option. It'll make fixing browser inconsistencies easier, and usually (although not always) means the page has been coded well. However, just because your HTML is valid, doesn't mean it's well coded. Well structured, semantic markup, is what will work best for your site. Use headers when and where appropriate, use lists for lists of information, tables for tabular data etc.

4. Use valid, semantic markup, separating style from content and ensure any images and scripts used are kept to a compressed size and this will come naturally.

5. As per hurricane's response. Alt attributes are there to give alternative text when an image doesn't load. You need to appreciate that not everyone will load images, so getting a face full of keywords that have nothing to do with the image isn't very fair. I rarely find a reason to have a title attribute on an image. The alt attribute should do the job well enough, and if the image is linked then the title attribute should be on the link not the image describing what the link is for. Definitely never repeat the value of an alt attribute as a title attribute, again, if a screen reader is reading your page out to someone they could potentially hear the same content duplicated over and over. I doubt they'd stick around very long.

[Rarst]

1. A Sitemap for a blog isn't necessarily a great idea. My blog has over 700 posts, I'd hate to see the sitemap for that.

He meant XML sitemap for search engines, not page for users. I had seen nested XML sitemap holding 17000+ links without any trouble. :)

[sarahG]

An XML Sitemap, yeah can hold more but I still wouldn't bother with one for a blog due to reasons already stated.

[sizzler_chetan]

Missing all-in-one SEO pack plugin?
I take it as a must for SEO of wordpress blogs. And it works really well.

[kocharvimal]

nice info...will be helpful...will put all the plugins in my post...

[navjotjsingh]

Missing all-in-one SEO pack plugin?
I take it as a must for SEO of wordpress blogs. And it works really well.

You need to try Platinum SEO Plugin...imports all All in One SEO Settings and offers lot more including automatic 301 redirecting of links in case you change either global permalinks format or even for a single post.

Check here: http://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack/ or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/

[silent_thunder]

I think everyone missed this point we have to submit the Sitemap manually to search engines if we need fast results. XML sitemap is used by all the three major search engines google,yahoo and msn .therefore if you create a sitemap for one of the search engines you can submit it to all of the rest.

Meta keywords are not useless, Keyword stuffing still gets a heavy penalty so that means google still considers meta keywords important

[Indyan]

I dont use any of these all in one seo packs. i have already done almost all of the things they do manually or by using another plugin.

[sarahG]

Meta keywords are not useless, Keyword stuffing still gets a heavy penalty so that means google still considers meta keywords important

That's funny, because Google ignores the meta keywords.

Meta keywords are useless from an SEO point of view because
1. Google completely ignores them
2. Other search engines may read them but won't place much weight on them
3. They can potentially hinder your rankings in search engines that read them, but they won't benefit your rankings.

However, the meta description and keywords are in the header for other reasons and therefore can/should be included to provide the information that they were designed for ie. a unique description about the page and a selection of keywords relevant to that page. But as this thread is about SEO and not accessibility, the point still stands. You will not alter your rankings in the top 3 search engines because of your meta description or keywords.

They were used and abused in the 90s and have lost all credibility.