The O in blOg stands for Optimize. Your blog and/or websites traffic is very dependent on how well your site is optimized. There are many ways to optimize your site for search engines, overall website performance and page load time. All of these points play a very important role for your site, so don’t discount any.
Page Titles
Title all of your pages! The titles of each page are heavily weighted in searches and are also the title in search engine results. Also set your permalinks to reflect the page title in the URL (example: CaffeineKeyboard.com/Contact is far superior than CaffeineKeyboard.com/page5).
Meta Description
Put a keyword rich description on every page. Search engines use this description to display in search results. This description can set you apart from your competition – research keywords and key terms to include in this page description and limit the description to 160 characters.
Meta Keywords
Keywords are used less frequently than in the past, descriptions are used more now. Keywords are still important to use and are picked up by websites other than search engines. It’s best to use both meta descriptions (with keywords in the description) and keywords, if you choose to only use one, then use a description.
Search for keywords using Google Insights, Adwords Keyword Search and Word Tracker
Photos
Appropriately name photos and use alt tags on all photos. Image searches display images from all websites, so don’t forget about being found by image searches. Also, websites are seen in a better light by search engines and website graders when your images have alt tags.
RSS feed
Since you have a blog make sure you also have an RSS feed. I recommend using Feedburner to do so, as you can also track your subscribers and obtain statistics.
Links
- Minimize redirects – redirecting, rather than linking directly, can take longer for the page to load.
- Page errors – make sure all of your pages are working properly and successfully link to one another.
- Outbound links – if you link out to another website, make sure that as long as you have the link listed, it works (sometimes they change).
Load Time
The faster your website loads, the better. Your search engine rankings improve and you won’t test website visitors patience. People leave slow websites before they fully load and you’ll lose traffic before you even have a chance.
- Reduce number of WordPress plugins. Delete inactive plugins.
- Optimize images – shrink the actual image, don’t just resize the image with coding
- Delete unused files or duplicate files
Test your website’s load time at: Pingdom and Google Page Speed (Pingdom also shows you which files take longer to load).
These are just a few ways you should optimize your blog. In what ways do you optimize your blog?
Previous posts include B is for Blog and L is for Listen. Stay tuned for the last post, G, to conclude this B.L.O.G. series and find out other ways you can better your blogging. You can also subscribe below to receive these updates via email:
