Your Blog Settings Are Probably Costing You Free Traffic To Your Site

You should already be aware of blogging basics and you're ready to start getting traffic off of your blog marketing

. You already know you must decide on your content topic, select your keywords, write the post and publish it, ping it to the social marketing and bookmarking sites and then send it to the people on your list. Then the search engines discover your blog, move you up in their SEO hierarchy and you magically get millions of people to your site in just five minutes. Obviously it does not happen quite that quickly. But do you know the settings on your blog might be negatively impacting your SEO, which makes it much more difficult to get free visitors?

I'm going to talk about several of the issues with your blog settings that you will want to check so that you're getting the biggest benefit possible.

Permalink Settings

The original settings for most blogs numbers at the end of the permalink. i.e. yourdomainname.com/?p12345. Guess how influential these numbers are for the search engines? They are useless. You need to modify this so that your keyword (which should be part of your post name) becomes the permalink ending. You should update your blog settings so that the name of the post replaces the numbers. Be aware - if your blog isn't new you should install a plugin first. The John Goodley plugin Redirection can help with the transfer of the old permalinks to your SEO improved links. When viewing the permalinks (that should now be the name of the post) you should also make it more streamlined. All the search engines prefer simple permalinks so you should remove the generic words. The end result should be a short permalink, includes your targeted keyword in it & makes sense to the reader.

Canonical URL, Do You Know What It Is?

Are you aware that search engines will frequently think you have two different (but the same) sites? You can access every website online two ways. The "www" can be included or skip it by using http://. The search engines think these are two different sites. I am assuming you know that this is not good. Don't you want all links, visitors, etc to show up on a single website vs. splitting up between the two? It's really imperative that this gets rectified. Using Google Webmaster tools is one option. You just tell them whether you want to use the www or not. Another option is a plugin to handle this. The plugin from above (Redirection - John Goodley) will do this.

Duplicate Content

Most blogs come out-of-the-box with the idea that you intend visitors to locate content from your site as many ways as possible. This is good for readers, but bad for Googe etc. Besides the post title, blogs also typically search by tags, categories, dates and author names. The main search engines usually consider it as duplicated content. They really, really don't like this. If you decide to keep these search options open for those people who are reading it, it can be done. You just need to let Google, etc know to not index these pages. A plugin called Install Robots Meta - Joost DeValk can do this if the option isn't availalable in your theme.

These are only a couple of your settings you will want to check when your blog is set up. There are more that I don't have the space to write about. Keep searching. Find them, fix them, so you can get more out of your blog marketing... automatically.

by: Gail Ramberg

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