* Changing the name of the domain in wordpress settings to have the www (unless decided differently)
* Enabling nested comments in wordpress – settings -> discussion
* Adding ping services in wordpress – Adding ping services means that you can send trackbacks to other blogs which lets them know when you link to their posts. It also gets your site listed in Technorati and other blog aggregation services.
* Sign-Up To Feedburner – Feedburner was purchased by Google a few years ago for $100m and is one of my favourite services online. It allows you to keep track of how many subscribers your blog has and what services your readers use. Not only that, but you can easily setup email subscriptions and insert social bookmarking links directly into your feed.
* The title of a page should be just the topic, no need to put the “brand” / “site name” on every page. In upload – we can’t rank well for upload anyway.
* Get My Social Media Profiles – If you’re hoping your site will become a well known brand in your niche then it’s important to get accounts on the top social media sites with your site name to stop people hijacking your brand in the future. These should also help you ‘dominate’ the search results for your name. To start with, I recommend signing up to: Twitter, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Youtube and Flickr and any other sites that are relevant to your niche.
In wordpress (using a plugin such as awesome SEO plugin) use this:
- Home Title: Dog Food : BonzoBread (This is the phrase I’m trying to get my site to rank for and a brand name)
- Post Title: %post_title%
- Page Title: %page_title% | %blog_title%
* Meta tags for descriptions (important and with keywords) and keywords (less important since google is not using it anymore)
* Permalinks structure – using the post name right after the domain
* Having keywords and key-phrases focused and used in:
- The title tag for your homepage
- The heading of your site
- Your logo
- As anchor text in links from other websites
- content
Google external keyword tool is a good place to start to see which phrases are popular in your audience. Make sure you select ‘All Countries and Territories’ on the left and then ‘Exact match’ on the right hand side to get accurate results.
* Pay attention to alt tags (and maybe also title tags as well for firefox)
* Interlinking materials on the site – Not only is this useful in terms of SEO, but it also gives your readers more posts to read and thus increases your pageviews.
* Choose one from WWW or Non-WWW and create a 301 redirect from one to the other. Tell webmaster tools which one you prefer and also set .htaccess to redirect:
# Begin 301
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
* When having many pages or links that have the same materials, or just different links that lead to same content by different ways (like tag pages and archives and categories in wordpress) it is best to use only one of them and then block the rest with “NoIndex” to “preserve” link juice. In the plugin mentioned above there is an option for that.
* Adding rel=”nofollow” to “read more” “continue” links. There is no need for it as anchor text, just make sure there is a link to the full item with the keywords needed (in wordpress the title of the post is the link)
* Using Google Webmaster Tools is very important
* Building links and getting lots of backlinks. Some ways of doing that is:
- Guest Posts – I really like links from guest posts as they send traffic, they’re relevant, and you can usually customise the anchor text of the link to be anything you want. If you want to learn more about this method, I have a written a detailed guide here.
- Write Awesome Content – There’s nothing better than writing an article that gets tons of links from relevant bloggers. If you put enough work into your content and regularly engage with other bloggers in the niche, they’re going to link to your posts.
- Link Out – When you link out, people link back. I don’t recommend link exchanges or filling up your blog roll, but if you find something on another site that your audience might enjoy, don’t be afraid to share it. You never know, that big blog might just send their 5-figure audience your way.
- Collaborate – Collaborating with other influencers in your niche is not only a great way to connect with more people, but it’s also a good way to get people talking about you. Oftentimes when I have interviewed people, they will link back to the interview from their own site. I also see people doing group projects which involve over 20 people and then end up having them all promote the one resource. If you can get other people involved, they’re going to help you spread the word.