The Ways of the SEO Samurai

The first thing the SEO Samurai would do would be to install or sign up for a search engine optimized blogging platform, such as Wordpress or Blogger. With both services, you can sign up for free on their respective web-site, and make your blog live in several easy steps such as naming and registering it. However, with Wordpress, you can also download their software and install it on your own server. The pros of doing this is that you can optimize it even more by adding many plugins that aren’t normally offered on the online version of the platform. Hosting is very cheap nowadays, and having your own install of Wordpress will make you stand out from the rest because of your distinctive look and features.

So let’s say you sign up for hosting and install Wordpress. Congratulations! You now have a blog with the overly-used shiny blue theme that is used by default and thousands of other people. Your first step here is to change it, because any visitor that comes to your blog won’t take you as serious as they have probably seen that template a thousand times before. Once you select from the many free themes available, and have your own unique look, it’s time to install some plugins.

Because this is a guide on SEO, the first plugin I would recommend is the “All In One SEO Pack.” This extremely easy to use plugin starts working right after you upload it. What it does is take your existing posts and pages and makes them accessible to search engines; so more people will find you by using basic keywords in Google, Yahoo, Live, or anything else. What it does is upgrades your meta tags, which are basically hidden informative areas of your site that only search engines read, and makes them clear to external sites and software. If your meta tags are clear and understandable to the search engine’s spider bots, (software that crawls your site for content,) then you will appear higher up in search rankings and in result, you’ll get more interested readers.

Another wonderful plugin that helps in the way of the SEO Samurai, is “Simple Tags.” Simple Tags allows you to create tags relating to your post – tags are individual words that are separated by commas that helps other sites know what your post is about. For example, a post about dogs may have the tags of: dogs, breeding, dog food, training, etc. After you write a post about dogs, or whatever, and enable the Simple Tags plugin, all you have to do is paste them in an open tags bracket: [ Tags ] and then close them in a closed tags bracket: [ /Tags ] (Don’t add spaces in between the brackets when you do it - I had to add spaces so that Wordpress wouldn’t think those were tags.) These tags will automatically be sent to Technorati, a blog resource and directory, where other bloggers will find your post when they search for your tag. Technorati gives them a sample of the post, and then they click on your title to come back to your blog. It’s 100% automated and after a while you will start to see readers coming from Technorati hourly. You can see what the tags look like at the end of this post.

Changing your URLs to friendly-urls also helps a tremendous amount because a search engine will then include your post title as keywords. For example, what do you think would be easier for a search engine to find: /p?-123a4891 or /this-is-my-post-about-dogs? Exactly. On Wordpress, to enable friendly-urls, all you have to do is go to settings, permalinks, and select one of the layout options available. I have chosen month and name, because that will show the archived month number and the post title. You can choose whichever you want, but in my opinion this one looks the neatest. After you select the option you want, click save options, and after a moment your links will be updated! Note: if this doesn’t work, see if you you need to rename your .htaccess file. This is a tiny script located in your base directory of your Wordpress installation, and rename it from .htaccess.txt to just .htaccess.

One last and very easy thing to do when improving your SEO is to trackback, or link back to other blogs. Almost every blog has the trackback feature activated, so linking to other blogs or even your own in almost every post is a very simple and beneficial thing to do. All you have to do is link a word or a few words to another blog’s related post or take the word “dog” and link it to your dog category, if you have one. Now don’t go linking a random word to your PayPal donate page, because that will just make people angry. Linking to your own blog or others will create a trackback, or an external link in the comments section of that specific post, letting the search engine find your site more easily and generating a back link which improves your traffic and overall page rank. I’ll trackback to this post by simply linking to it, and you’ll see what a trackback looks in its comments by clicking here.

Of course these are just a few easy ways to improve the traffic and overall quality of your site, but it’s definitely recommended to do whether you have a well established blog, or just starting a new one. Things may be slow at first, but if you make the practice a habit by the way of the SEO Samurai, you will turn out very successful and have many pleased readers. I hope you have enjoyed reading this post, and I hope it has helped you. Happy blogging.