Basic SEO for Blawgs
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is important for blawgs to be found via search engines. Let’s start off with some basics.
Mainly there are two main techniques of SEO - off site and on site techniques.
Off Site SEO as the name suggests depends on factors external to your blawg and it is mainly getting links into your blawg from other relevant quality sites. It is good if the anchor text of the link contains some keywords, for example, Intellectual Property Blawg is a better anchor text than www.ipblawg.com. That’s it!
On Site SEO, in contrast, are things that you can do to optimize your blawg. These mainly include ensuring that there is no duplicate content on your blawg, optimizing the titles tags of your blawg postings and making the URLs search engine friendly.
Let’s look at these on site optimization factors in detail.
- Duplicate Content: Normally, in blawgs duplicate content is generated by the Archives and Authors listing page. For example, in the LexFamilia Blawg you can get to the same article ‘Surrogacy and Public Policy’ via http://lexfamilia.wordpress.com/surrogacy/surrogacy-and-public-policy and http://lexfamilia.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/surrogacy-and-public-policy/. This is something that is best avoided by a simple robots.txt entry which looks like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /2004/
Disallow: /2005/
Disallow: /2006/
Disallow: /2007/
Disallow: /2008/
Disallow: /2009/
Disallow: /2010/
Disallow: /2011/
Disallow: /2012/
Disallow: /2013/
Disallow: /2014/
Disallow: /2015/
Disallow: /2016/
Disallow: /2017/
Disallow: /2018/
Disallow: /2019/
The above code disallows search engine spiders from indexing the archive and the author listing pages. - Optimizing Title Tags: Optimize the title tag so that it ideally follows the structure
<post title>|<blawg title>. An example of non-optimized titles can be found at Brett Trout’s Blawg where his main page - http://blog.bretttrout.com/ and http://blog.bretttrout.com/2007/04/blawg-review-106.html have the same title tag of “Blawg IT-Internet Patent, Trademark and Copyright Issues with Attorney Brett Trout”. An optimized title is not only good for SEO but also helps people know what the blawg post is all about at a glance. - To optimize titles for Blogger, MovableType and WordPress, see this article.
- To optimize titles for TypePad, read the article here.
- If you are using WordPress then there are a few useful plugins like All-In-One SEO Pack, SEO Title Tag and Meta Head Description.
- Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs: Thankfully, most blog platforms come with an option of SEF URLs and for WordPress log into the administrator panel and choose Options -> Permalinks and change the Default Option.
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