In my next few posts I am going to talk a bit about SEO for Blogs. Doing Search Engine Optimization for blogs is pretty similar to doing SEO for a regular website, but there are a few additional techniques for bloggers. If you are using WordPress there are a few essential wordpress plugins that you should install and specific settings for your permalinks.

I am going to split my SEO for Blogs series into 5 different parts:

1) Keyword Research

2) Optimimum Permalink Structure for WordPress SEO

3) Essential WordPress Plugins for SEO

4) On site optimization for blogs

5) Off site optimization for blogs

Ideally you should think about keyword research before you start your blog. If you have been blogging for a while and haven’t yet done this don’t worry as it is possible to do it now and then use your keywords in your future blog posts.

When I am doing SEO for a blog I like to split my keyword research into two parts:

(1) Find a reasonably high traffic phrase for my blog in general

(2) Make a big list of lower traffic (less competitive) phrases for my blog posts

There are lots of keyword research tools available, but the quickest and easiest free tool that I know of is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. All you need to do is:

• Enter 1 or more suggestions for keywords in the box
• Choose “All countries and Territories” from the drop down menu (or the specific country that you are targeting)
• Click the “Get Keywords” button
• I also recommend choosing “Exact” from the “Match Type” menu on the right hand side

You will see a big list of keyword phrases that should include the keywords that you typed in and some related keywords. For each keyword you will also see the estimated number of monthly searches for each keyword. I usually find that this number is slightly inflated but it acts as a good guide and a od way to compare different keywords.

If you are finding it hard to create a big list of keywords you may want to consider a subscription to Wordtracker as this tool is very helpful at suggesting related keywords and makes it easy to build massive lists of keywords.

You probably want to go through the above process a few times for different keyword combinations and then save your keyword lists to a text file or a spreadsheet.

Next you should try and decide on 1-2 keyword phrases for your blog as a whole. You should choose something that has more than 3000 seearches per month and your aim will be to get the home page of your blog on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase. Before you decide on a phrase it is important that you check out the competition for your phrase. Go to Google and enter your phrase and take a look at the websites that are on the first and second pages of results for that keyword. Can you beat them? If it looks impossible (based on the number of backlinks that they have) then search for an alternative phrase.

Once you have your main phrase(s) you should aim to construct a big list of less competitive keywords. Look for keyword phrases that have only a few hundred searches per month. Typically these will have lower competition than your main phrase. Keep this big list of keyword phrases somewhere safe and whenever you make a blog post choose a keyword phrase from your list to base your blog post on.

In the next few parts of my SEO for Blogs series I will cover in detail how to optimize your blog and your blog posts for your chosen keywords and what essential settings and WordPress plugins you need to setup to maximise your SEO success.

Read Part Two – Optimimum Permalinks Structure for WordPress SEO

Download my SEO EBook to learn how to get your blog to the top of the search engines.

Related Posts:

• Increase Your Traffic by Using Long Tail Keywords
• SEO for Blogs: Part Five – Off Site Optimization
• SEO for Blogs – Part Four: On Site Optimization
• SEO For Blogs Part Three: 10 of the Best Wordpress SEO Plugins
• SEO for Blogs – Part Two: Wordpress Permalink Structure

For SEO purposes you may want to have a static first post or home page in your WordPress site. In addition to this you may also want to show some of your latest posts or some snippets of your latest posts after your static first post.

Traditionally, when you install WordPress and start posting to it, the last post you made will always be the first post that shows on your home page.

You may well want it to be this way, but alternatively you may want to always display a welcome message on the front page of your site.

For example on this SEO site I have a static first post displaying on my home page and I also show snippets of the latest 5 posts.

So how do you do this? Luckily it is not too complicated…

STEP ONE:

Create the welcome message that you want to display on the home page of your site. In this  post you probably want to welcome your visitors, give them a brief intro to what your website is about, encourage an optin (if applicable) and anything else you want.  Here are the instructions for creating a static home page (for WordPress 2.7)

(1) Login to your WordPress Admin area
(2) Click on “Pages” on the menu and select “Add New”
(3) Create your new page
(4) Remember to include your site’s main keywords in the title of the post and in a few places  throughout the post for SEO purposes
(5) Publish your page
(6) Click on “Settings” in the menu and select “Reading”
(7) From the drop down menu choose “A static page” from the selection for the “Front Page Display”
(8) Select the page that you just created from the drop down menu and click “save changes”

Once you have completed these steps if you view your site, your new welcome message should be the only thing that is displayed on the home page and the visitor can navigate via whatever widgets you have (e.g. categories, latest posts etc).

If you want to go one step further and show the last say 3, or 5 posts underneath your static welcome message, you can also do step 2.

STEP TWO

(1) The first step is to edit one of your theme files to add some code to make the home page show your latest posts underneath the welcome message. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the  PHP code.
(2) Click on “Appearance” and “Editor” in the menu
(3) Click on “Page Template”
(4) First back up this page template. This is so you can quickly and easily recover if it goes wrong. To do this just open a text editor on your computer and copy and paste the contents of page.php (the page template) into your text editor and save it.
(6) Look for the line of code that looks like this:
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
(7) AFTER this line of code insert the following code:

<p>
<h3><font color=#990000><b>Latest posts…. </b></font></h3>
</p>

<?php $temp_query = $wp_query; ?>
<?php query_posts(‘showposts=5′); ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>Read more….</a>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

(8) If you want you can edit the part that says “Latest Posts…” to say whatever you want. Or you can change from h3 to h2 or whatever you prefer.

This shows snippets of the latest 5 posts. If you want to show a different number of posts  then change the ‘showposts=5′ to ‘showposts=3′ or whatever number you want.

(9) Save the file

That’s it! Your WordPress home page should now be showing a static welcome message and snippets of the latest 5 posts.

For more ways to improve your search engine rank download my SEO EBook.

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Related Posts:

• SEO for Blogs: Part Five – Off Site Optimization
• SEO for Blogs – Part Four: On Site Optimization
• SEO For Blogs Part Three: 10 of the Best Wordpress SEO Plugins
• SEO for Blogs – Part Two: Wordpress Permalink Structure
• SEO for Blogs – Part One: Keyword Research