Structure A SEO Blog
Keeping blog organized is very important, making navigation smooth for you and for readers. As blog organization I think on building WordPress as silos, what in essence means thematically. Purpose of silos creating is to help Google and other search engines easier to see the site, indexing it in the right way, and eventually bringing more traffic. WordPress categories are helping so much for proper silo building. Besides that, in this article, I will guide you through plugin and pinging organization for WordPress. So, if you’re not sure how properly to build and organize your WordPress SEO weblog, here is a basic guide:
Blog’s Tagline
Tagline is important, because it shows in search engine results. Besides that, it also displays in the browser’s tag when your website loads.
To set up weblog’s tagline, go to your WordPress admin / Settings / General, and enter the name and tagline for your weblog.
Make sure to include your major keyword, and even better, if you can, put it as a first word of the phrase.
Why Blog Categories Are Important?
Here we are coming to building WordPress in silo way. I have researched and watched several videos, and found this one from seomoz helpful and the easiest to understand. Watch the video and see what I mean.
In short, keep your categories organized:
- so your visitors can navigate through your WordPress weblog better and easily can find what they want
- in purpose of search engine optimization (silo organized categories help search engine to see properly your site, giving you better SEO rank and eventually send you more traffic),
- In silo-ed categories you need deep linking, to link your posts to other posts in the same silo. For example, if your silos (categories) are “SEO” and “WordPress,” then the goal is to have your SEO posts interlinking with one another and your WordPress posts interlinking with one another.
Manage Categories for your WordPress:
- Use paper and pen to design your blog;
- Go to your WordPress admin (dashboard)/ Posts/ Categories, and set up your categories and sub-categories. Make sure the keyword for your topic or sub-niche is included in your category name;
- Use the “description” box to enter a phrase that will show up when the visitor’s cursor hovers over the category name.
WordPress Plugins
With WordPress you can easily install add-ons called plugins which will bring more functionality to your blog. There are hundreds of them from helping you to optimize for Search Engines to translating blog in other languages, or saving it from spam comments.
Installing and Activating Plugins – Watch my WordPress weblog video tutorials. There you will find how to install and which plugins are important for search engine optimization. The installation is quite similar for all of them, and once you install the first WordPress plugin, you will be confident with configuration of others as well. Further you can browse through WordPress plugins directory.
Internal links
To connect your pages use anchor text. You can check at Wikipedia but in sum anchor text is clickable hyperlink, giving you option to put keywords, and if you are linking from the page that has good page rank, it will boost page rank of the blog post you are linking to, eventually boosting the SEO rank and getting more traffic to that blog post. At seomoz this process has been explained in details.
Now, this is very important. I already said that you can watch WordPress Video Tutorials, where you can see configuration of “All in one SEO”, “Google Sitemap” and couple more SEO important plugins. Nevertheless, I want to list 3 more plugins which are for advanced bloggers. What I mean, if you’re new to blogging and website building you can encounter terminology which can be confusing. If it’s your situation, then I suggest you go step by step with video tutorials first, and after that follow instructions for these plugins:
These plugins will give you more control in your blog structure linking. You will be able to determine nofollow for external links and you will have more control for your internal link juice.
You will notice mutual overlapping of some functions, and overlapping with “All in one SEO” and “Google Sitemap”, but it’s important to install and configure all these WordPress plugins, because every of them is bringing something unique. Where convergence is present, just disable that option for one of them (for example “WordPress SEO Master” meta description is overlapping with “All in one SEO” meta description – so I have just disabled this option in “WordPress SEO Master” plugin). It’s not wise just to install these plugins, so read carefully instructions from plugins sites and follow instructions on plugin’s option page in your WordPress admin.
Update: There is a new version of WordPress SEO Master plugin, which is covering all options from All in one SEO. So, now I see it’s smarter to disable “All in one SEO”, and let “WordPress SEO Master” do whole job.
External links
Use external links to provide relevant resources. If you are using Blogroll to exchange links with other bloggers, then stay in your niche, because Google can „penalize“ you and you can lose SEO traffic if you are linking too much to topics outside of yours. This also count for blog posts, i.e. external link has to be relevant to post topic.
Ping blog
When you publish new post on your WordPress blog, it automatically announces that content to various directories by “pinging” them. Here is the list of services I ping every time with new post:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.kping.com/ping/
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc
There is no need to adjust that every time, it needs to be set only once on your blog and it will be remembered for all next posts. To set up this, in your WordPress admin, just go to Settings/ Writing and scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter the links in the rectangle.
It is important to have pingomatic (or similar services) in the list. I saw many larger lists, but I do not see point if you ping Pingomatic and after separately ping many other services (technorati, weblogs…) which are already pinged with pingomatic. Similar service is kping. I use both (pingomatic and kping) because there are some directories that are not covered on pingomatic.
There’s just one more thing. You will certainly want to install plugin Smart Update Pinger. It will adjust your blog to ping directories only when you’re publishing a new post, not when editing (what will prevent blogging directories to see your pings as spam).
This is end of the 3rd step from How to create a successful blog? Happy silos building and happy blogging!
