SEO Basics for Blogs

[vandelay]

I have written an article about some SEO issues that are specific to blogs. If you're new to blogging I think it would be especially helpful (more so for WordPress users than others). You can read it here.

There's also another article specifically for new WordPress users. When you're starting a new WP blog there are a few things you should take care of right away to get the best performance from your blog. That article is here.

[jshaffstall]

Those are some nice articles for new bloggers!

With regard to the duplicate content issue, we've recently had a discussion about that here at Bloggeries, in this thread: Content is King - Queen - Jack - Joker and the Aces on the Web!

The summary is that you can allow Google to index category pages if you limit posts to just one category each.

Jay

[vandelay]

I agree with that thought, but I think it's equally important to only use excerpts on category pages.

[jshaffstall]

Originally Posted by vandelay

I agree with that thought, but I think it's equally important to only use excerpts on category pages.

Oh, no arguments there. I do that on my blog, to avoid duplicate content issues between the category page and the post page.

The advantage to limiting a post to one category is that the category page itself can be indexed without worrying about duplicate content, to be a possible entry point for search engine traffic.

Jay

[Bloggeries]

Personally search engine traffic is one of my main goals at all times when optimizing my site or blogs. The thread Jay is referring to develops nicely and explains it well. I'm going to be going back and limiting it to one category even though I think I have a good index rate as is I'm going to verify and if it's not almost 100% it's time to go back and modify because technorati traffic is time bound while search engine traffic can be timeless. Slightly of topic I"m also going to begin targeting less competitive longer tail key phrases as the aggregate of many can often outweigh the benefits of one good one and is alot less expensive and time consuming .

I'd like to hear more about limiting it to excerpts for the category pages though. How do you go about doing that?

Rob

[vandelay]

I use WordPress, so in the template pages this coding:

<?php the_content(); ?>

gets changed to this:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

[Prettylady]

Thank you for these useful tips.