SEO might bore me, but it's still important to know what you're doing.

I’ve had several conversations lately (both online and off) about Search Traffic and whether or not it’s the best way to acquire customers.  My argument has typically been that blogs are already search optimized and that you WILL win searches by blogging frequently about what you do.  For this reason I’ve be known to say that it makes more sense to focus on a social strategy since you’re going to win searches anyway.

With that said, I DO think that it’s important to set yourself up to win as many searches as possible.  Here are a few things to tweak on your WordPress blog to give it a little more search juice.

• A Great SEO Plugin – I used to use the All in One SEO Pack, but yesterday I found a new plugin called the Platinum SEO pack which had more options.  Both plugins will help you make sure that you’ve got your Meta information in order and that your site is being crawled correctly.
• Do you have a Sitemap? – Google does a pretty good job of crawling and indexing wordpress blogs on it’s own, but just to make sure, I always install the Google sitemap plugin.  It automatically generates and updates a valid .xml file every time you write a post while pinging the major search engines to let them know there is new content.
• Do you know the hirarchy? Remember, there is a specific order to the importance of different areas and tags on each page and they all interact with wordpress in different ways.  Here’s how I rank them in order of importance.

1. Your URL – Make sure you set up your permalink structure so that there are keywords in the url’s of your post pages.  You need to include /%postname%/ as part of the equation  and title your posts with keywords that you want to rank for.
2. <title> tags – for post pages, this will be a combination of your blog title and the post title.  Again, you should title your posts strategically.
3. <h1> – On post pages this will be the title of your post (starting to see the pattern).
4. <h2> – Your post titles on the home page will be scripted as <h2> elements.
5. <h3> – <h6> – I don’t see these used much in wordpress, but feel free to use them within your posts to emphasize important keyword-rich statements.

• Does Meta matter? – Depends on who you ask.  It’s easy to get it right so I see no reason not to spend a little extra time.  My SEO plugin lets me use Tags and Categories as Meta keywords, so everything works together.

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