Is your blog search engine friendly??

The most search engine friendly blog platform to use is WordPress which you can download from WordPress.org for free. If you get web hosting through Hostgator or Dreamhost you’ll be able to install WordPress using Fantastico’s one click install meaning you’ll be ready to go in seconds. Assuming you have taken my advice and set-up a WordPress blog on your own domain you’ll also need to install some plugins and change your permalink structure to make your site more search engine friendly. Changing your permalink structure is very simple, just go to options, then permalinks. From there add /%postname%/ into the “custom structure” field and select “Update Permalink Structure”.

The most important plugins to install to make your WordPress blog search engine friendly are the All In One SEO Pack (Generate search engine friendly page titles, adds keyword and descr i ption meta tags), Google XML Sitemaps (Generates an XML sitemap which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo), Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (Generates a fully customizable HTML sitemap) and Similar Posts (Adds similar posts to your posts pages helping spread link popularity).

Once your blog and has been set-up to be SEO friendly you’ll now be ready to start writing your posts. It’s important to decide what the main keywords are that you want to focus on targeting. Try not to focus on more than 2-3 general topics (keywords) and develop a list of more focused keywords or keyphrases related to your topics. You can use a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to help you with this. Once you have developed a nice list of keywords that you want to target you can start writing posts incorporating these keywords, in the titles and within the posts body. Over time with more and more posts you will be building keyword authority for these keywords. It is also a good idea linking all your pages back to your home page using your blogs main keyword as the anchor text. I accomplish this by adding the link to my blogs footer.