I was reading an article over at GrayWolf’s SEO Blog on optimizing your WordPress install for search engines and as I was following his advice on optimizing your blog by only using one category for each post, I realized something else.
I’ve always been pretty bad about adding multiple categories for posts as I assumed this would help me have more routes into my blog, but at the same time I was creating duplicate content in the Google bot’s eyes. So I decided to correct my mistake. That is tip one.
Tip two – I realized while I was going through my older posts I found quite a few typos mostly resulting from the fact that I can’t type. I found several posts with these typos and they where not helping me at all. Most of these posts where ones where I just put together a quick post and posted. I try to create my posts in Word or One Note and then post them to the blog, but I don’t always do that, so I need to either use Firefox and not IE for making these quick sort of posts( Firefox has a cool little feature where it will point our typos by underlining misspellings. IE does not have that feature and unless you are very careful then you will look like a fool.
Tip three — Read your own blog. Many times as you create more and more blog posts you cover the same or similar topics. This is a great opportunity for you to highlight earlier posts that may be useful to your readers, but where written before they became subscribers. As I was correcting my typos and fixing the categories, I found some posts that I thought where pretty good, but at the same time most new subscribers would not see them unless they clicked through a lot of post pages. I need to do a better job of accenting those posts and bringing them closer to the front of the blog. Such as my Ranking Well with Content post I need to start utilizing the Related Posts plugin for this purpose. Afterall its much easier for my to find a post in the admin panel than it is for a reader to browse through all the posts. You could search but if you did not know it was there how would you know what to search for how would you find it. I need to do that task for you.
Tip Four — I’ve been adding a lot of feeds to my feed reader lately as you must read a lot of other blogs to keep abreast of the pulse of the BlogSphere. This helps me in several different areas of my blog. One it helps me get ideas on items to write when I don’t have a clue what to write about. Reading the post from GrayWolf gave me the idea for this post. This also helps me to know what is hot in the BlogSphere and what others in my niche are talking about. I’ve also learned about some bloggers that I need to be following, but I did not know they existed. But I realized something else during this process, the default for RSS options is the last 10 posts. Now this is great for someone who adds your feed a few days after you start your blog, but what about those people that find you after you’ve been blogging a few years. Its not practical for you to publish an entire feed of all your posts to they readers, but is 10 posts really enough for most people. I’m bumping my number up to 25.
Making more posts available to new readers gives your older posts more exposure and should help provide a better experience for your new readers. It should not matter to the Social websites such as NetVibes and your readers from there as they can still elect to show a smaller number of posts on those sites while allowing your new readers that utilize OutLook more of your content.
[tags]blogging, ranking well with content, seo, wordpress[/tags]
Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
