SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make By Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts

Blog SEO So easy a child could do it 16-year old blogger Passive income: ~$1000/month from Google AdSense Effort required: 1 hr/month Thank you, Google! My daughter, SEO-in-training

#5 for “neopets” #3 for “neopets cheats” #6 for “neo pets” etc.

Biggest SEO Mistakes Leaving title tags to be auto-generated (from the post name, category name, etc.) Squandering your “crawl equity” by letting pages get indexed that don’t deserve to be (“Email this page” etc.) Having multiple “homes” for your blog Not using unique “Optional Excerpt” to minimize duplicate content Not using rel=nofollow to direct PageRank flow

Biggest SEO Mistakes Over-reliance on date-based archives No stability in keyword focus on category & tag pages Suboptimal URLs (too long, too many words, too many directories) Only one RSS feed, and it’s un-optimized Hosting blog/feed URLs on a domain you don’t own Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally

What Are We Waiting For?? Let’s Fix Your Blog!

Rejig Internal Linking Structure Tag clouds & tag pages & tag conjunction pages (e.g. “UTW Theme Compatibility Thing” WordPress plugin) Related Posts (e.g. “Yet Another Related Posts” plugin) Top 10 posts (e.g. “Popularity Contest” plugin) Next & Previous / pagination (e.g. “WP-PageNavi” plugin)

Tags point to Technorati tag pages Tags point to internal tag pages

A tag page

Optimize Title Tags Blog name at the end of the title, not at the beginning Tag name should go in title on a tag page Customize with additional keywords for display only on your home page Override title tags w/ custom one ( “SEO Title Tag” WordPress plugin)

“SEO Title Tag” plugin for WordPress Allows you to override the title tag with a custom one on any post, static page, tag page, category page, etc. Now updated to work with WordPress 2.6 Can even define a custom title on ANY url Reverses the order of the blog name and the title, or drop the blog name altogether, or replace it with a shorter nickname Can use category’s description as the title on category pages Has a Mass Edit admin and an Options page to change settings Download at www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

“Thin Slicing” Make quick decisions. Don’t overthink. Only really works if you’re an expert E.g. hand-optimize title tags across hundreds of pages quickly (prioritized) Focus on your title tags, H1s and URLs Don't obsess, doesn’t have to be perfect. Instead, iterate. If you don’t have an admin interface, use a spreadsheet and do a database import

Thin slicing title tags

Great name for the blog!

Optimize URLs URL affects searcher clickthrough rates Short URLs get clicked on 2X long URLs (Source: MarketingSherpa, used with permission)

Optimize URLs Further, long URLs appear to act as a deterrent to clicking, drawing attention away from its listing and instead directing it to the listing below it, which then gets clicked 2.5x more frequently. http://searchengineland.com/080515-084124.php

Optimize URLs Subdomain? Subdirectory? New domain? Domain of your blog host? www.metlife.com/blog vs. StayingFitBlog.com Got a blogspot.com or wordpress.com URL? You benefit from their domain authority, but you’re forever wedded to them! Rewrite to contain keywords, hyphens not underscores Maintain legacy URLs even after switching platforms Keep post slugs relatively short (e.g. “Slug Trimmer” or “Clean Trunks” plugin)

Optimize URLs Test and optimize URLs, but don’t lose link juice to previous URLs. 301 previous URLs to latest. No chains of 301s. WordPress handles 301s automatically when renaming post slugs Mass edit admin for URLs (post slugs) in WordPress – via the “SEO Title Tag” plugin (www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin)

Thin slicing URLs

Optimize Anchor Text Make the post’s title a link to the permalink page Use SEOMoz Backlink Anchor Text Analysis tool or BLA (tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) to look for opportunities to request revisions to anchor text on inbound links Internally link back to old, relevant posts within the body of a blog post. Don’t use “here” or “previously” etc. as the anchor text!

Post title is anchor text. “Permalink” is yucky anchor text!

“Sculpt” Your PageRank My preference is to have rel=nofollow... On links in trackbacks, comments (by default on most platforms) Where the link would be reciprocal On links to date-based archives, assuming you have category and tag hierarchy (noindexing/disallowing is not enough!)

Minimize Duplicate Content Code your Main Index Template to display “Optional Excerpts” on everything but permalink page For each post, write unique content (i.e. paraphrase), don’t just use the first couple paragraphs (i.e. Don’t use the <!--more--> tag!) Meta robots noindex & rel=nofollow are your friends Date-based archives “OR” Tag conjunction pages (e.g. netconcepts.com/tag/seo|articles) Printer-friendly versions

Improve the Keyword Focus Heading tags category name on category page Yes for post titles, no for dates! Emphasis tags within posts (bold, strong, etc.) “Sticky” posts Always appear at the top of the page A way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page e.g. “WP-Sticky” or “Adhesive” plugin

Sticky post

Optimize Your RSS Feeds Full text, not summaries 20 or MORE items (not just 10) Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post) Keyword-rich item <title> Your brand name in the item <title> Your most important keyword in the site <title> container Compelling site <description> Don’t put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss) An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines

Thank You! For an ebook on Google power searching, SEO checklists & worksheets, and audio recording, executive summary & transcript of thought leaders teleconferences on SEO & blogging, drop me your business card or e-mail your request to seo@netconcepts.com To contact me: stephan@netconcepts.com Download... PPT: http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/seo-mistakes.ppt Article: http://searchengineland.com/070823-082758.php