There is no doubt that blogging can be a highly effective means of getting your message to your desired audience. But the challenge is to get your audience to your blog.

There are, of course, many ways of achieving this. Social bookmarking and networking, forum submissions, article marketing and many other approaches are powerful. However, good old fashioned SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) should never be ignored.

What does this mean? Put simply it means looking at your blog not as seen by a human eye but as a search engine’s robotic crawler will view it during its periodic visits. How can we do that?

I use a free tool called SEO for Firefox. As its name implies this is a plugin for the Firefox web browser. Its icon sits at the bottom right of my browser window and also in the Tools section of my top toolbar. It does many things, but for me the most valuable is its “SEO XRay”.

Open up an individual post of your blog in Firefox, click on SEO XRay and you’ll see an analysis of some key elements of that page, including what a search engine would find as its title, its description and its keywords. Unless you’ve already done what I’m about to propose, or something similar, I will guess that whilst the title will probably show as the title of your post you’ll find the description and keywords labelled “N/a” (Not available).

Now this is just not good enough. Search engines differ as to exactly how they use this information, and the importance that they give to it, but they all want to see it there. So how can we ensure that there’s something there, relevant to each individual page on your blog? It is, of course, very easy to go into the theme editor of a WordPress blog and add description and keyword content there. That will be better than nothing but the problem is that they will come up exactly the same for every post, and that is unlikely to be what you want as you deal with many different aspects of your blog’s subject area.

Enter Platinum SEO Pack. This is a plugin for WordPress blogs that allows you to specify what you want to appear in the SEO-critical fields. I’m not going to go into detail here on how it is set up or even the full range of its functionality. Go, get it, install it on one of your blogs, and see the difference. By the way, it works on WordPress blog pages as well as posts.

(Incidentally, the links above to Platinum SEO Pack and SEO for Firefox are non-commercial. I get no financial reward if you decide to use these utilities. This post is meant solely as helpful information).

Tags: blogging, blogs, Meta description, Meta Keywords, Platinum SEO Pack, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO for Firefox, Wordpress plugins, WordPress SEO

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under SEO, SEO on WordPress, WordPress, blogging, keywords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.