General SEO Tips (A Sample from WordPress SEO Secrets Ebook)

Pay Attention to Headlines and Titles

Titles and headlines are unbelievably important for SEO. They tell people (and thus also searchengines) what a web page is all about in just a few important words. For that reason, the words we use in titles and headlines are very important. A web

page’s title appears in the title bar of the

web browser and in tabs for Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and up, and Safari. Headlines can beanywhere on a web page, but the ones at the top are often the ones that matter most.

Write strong headlines that include keywords

, because your post headline becomes thecontent of the title for the single page view of that post.

Titles are extremely important tosearch engines.

For any Google search, the main link you click on in the results is the text of

the page’s title.Title is often referred to as “title tags” because of the HTML code that creates the title for a web

page, which looks like this:

<title>Your Keyword-rich text goes here</title>

Hands down, the most important thing you can change to improve your SEO is thecontent of your page title tags.

Think carefully about what you want in your post titles.

We’ll get into the mechanics of how to

do this later.

It’s best to use a WordPress plugin that gives you the ability to separately edit your

title from your post headline.

Speaking of…

TITLETITLETITLETITLE

Use at Least One SEO Plugin

Get a plugin that enables meta tagging of single post pages and static pages

, if you

use WordPress. Here’s where the Blogger platform disappoints: a lack of extensibility. I use

the All in One SEO Pack ,but there are many SEO plugins for WordPress. Use these plugins to create better title tags for single post pages than just your heading-as-page-title allows. Usethem to create good description meta tags for each post page. Description meta tags are oftenused as the text snippet that appears in search results, so you want to write short, sweet,compelling descriptions that get people to click through.

XML Sitemaps

Have a sitemap.

You want an XML sitemap that’s friendly to Google and other search engines.The best way to get one that I’ve seen is the

Google Sitemaps Generator plugin for WordPress. With the click of a link, your sitemap can be regenerated when needed!

You don’t have to know what XML is or know anything about it. You don’t have to write any

code. What does an XML sitemap do? It helps Google know when you have new content on your blog

so that it can be added to Google’s index…

fast!

I find Google has indexed my posts not even ten

minutes after I click that Publish button in WordPress. It’s amazing.

If you redesign your blog, change you

r blog’s theme, or make changes to header, sidebar, or

footer content, you should rebuild your XML sitemap.

Remember Who You’re Really Writing For

Create content for people, not search engines.

You hear this all the time paraded as

wisdom. It’s true to a p

oint: it is people who will make your blog a success by linking to it and visiting it. If you offer compelling reasons for them to do both of those things, then you can rank well in search results even if you do less work on the other aspects of SEO.But how are people supposed to find you in the first place? That is the entire purpose of SEO. Solet me amend that little phrase:

Create content for people, but tweak it for search engines.

Another way to say

tweak

is (get ready for it)

optimize!

But you gotta admit, it would be fun if it was called SET, Search Engine Tweakification.