We Eat Bricks :: Web Development Blog

Traffic to my blog increased by about 20 percent after installing these plugins. They work! Let’s have a look at them.

All in One SEO Pack

“Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …”
Add titles, description and keywords to your wordpress blog post and pages. All are used by search engines to rank your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps
Creates a googe friendly sitemap which google will find and in return index your blog higher.

KB Robots.txt
This plugin gives you control over your robots.txt file. A robots.txt file gives instructions to search engines spiders on how to crawl the pages of your website. You can use the robots.txt to tell the search engines to ignore certain pages with the effect of focusing search engines attention on the pages you want index. Take a look at the robots.txt file of my blog for an example.

Be warned that the Google XML Sitemap plugin edits the robots.txt as well as the above. Be careful as it may overwrite your existing sitemap. Keep a copy of the file.
At this stage your blog will start looking very attractive to search engines and your search engine traffic in terms of unique page views should increase nicely. The next step is to capatalise on the traffic coming to your blog by providing incentives to keep the traffic moving around your website.

The following wordpress will plugins will achieve this.

Popularity Contest

You can create a most popular posts list with this plugin. Put the list in your blog sidebar to constantly promote your best content on each page of your blog.

Related Posts
Put this list at the end of each out your posts and it will automatically will generate a list of related posts.

Hopefully this 5 plugins will help increase traffic to your blog. They worked for me!

If there are any SEO Wordpress plugins that you would recommend, please leave a comment.

Thanks.

This tip is specifc to Wordpress blog users. Install the following plugin, the All in One SEO Pack .

It is configured to add post/blog related data to the title, description and keyword meta tags in the HTML of your blog and posts. This should help in your quest for Search Engine Optimisation.

Surprisingly I didn’t have meta tags for description and keywords so I’ll keep an eye my blog stats and report back if the addition of said info does have an effect.

A Google sitemap is a file on your website that lists your pages in a google friendly format. A google sitemap can help the Google search engine to index your site more successfully.

To create the sitemap I used the fantastic Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress Plugin.

It’s a great plugin, it will automatically update the sitemap when I add new posts or pages to my wordpress blog.

Nice!

Good luck.

By keywords here I mean words that people will type into their search engine and by title I mean the words inside the tags in the HTML of the webpage.

Search engines use the words in the title to determine the relevancy of the page to a search. Use specific, descriptive keywords to improve the relevancy.

Try think from the perspective of the person doing the search when phrasing those titles. That’s it for SEO TIP #2.

Good luck!

In this SEO series of articles I aim to provide a list of practical tips to optimisation your blog or website for the search engines.

Let’s start off with “Pretty Permalinks” using the Apache mod_rewrite.

Compare the following urls.

http://www.weeatbricks.com/?p=25

and

http://www.weeatbricks.com/2007/09/01/in_place_editor_field-method-in-ruby-on-rails/

The second is friendlier than the first. It gives an idea of the content of the article whereas the first is a mystery. Those all important search engine spiders can use those “pretty” urls to gain further data on the content of the article which in turn can increase the page rank of the article.

I use wordpress as my blogging platform. I created a .htaccess file in the root directory of the blog then turned Pretty Permalinks on in the Wordpress Admin.

That’s it and so ends the first SEO tip.

Stay tuned for more.