Building a Search Engine Friendly Blog

I have tried quite hard to make this blog as search engine friendly as possible. By this I mean that it ranks for selected key words and new posts are included quickly.

WordPress is quite search engine friendly “out of the box”, but there are some plugins that I use to improve matters significantly. They are:

1. Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin generates (sitemaps.org compatible) sitemaps of my WordPress blog and notifies Google, Yahoo, MSN Search / Bing and Ask.com whenever I make a new post. In the case of Google, new posts tend to be included within the Google listings within one hour of them being posted. This is great!

2. All in One SEO Pack. This plugin streamlines my WordPress blog for search engine optimization best practice. It allows me to manage titles, descriptions, keywords, duplicate content, etc. Although the plugin has many options, the defaults settings work well for me.

3. Social Bookmarks. This plugin adds graphic links to selected social networking sites at the end of each post so that visitors can submit posts to them very easily. See below each post on this page.

4. yaCAPTCHA. This plugin is very effective at blocking comment spam from automated bots. It uses a CAPTCHA system, whereby users have to input the characters from an image before they can post comments; it is quite hard for automated programs to do this. The plugin helps with search engine placement because it eliminates links from my site to the often dodgy sites that use automated comment bots.

I used to use a plugin for Google Analytics, but have now decided that it is better for me to include the relevant code in the footer of my custom WordPress theme.

I hope that you will find this useful for your own WordPress blog search engine optimization. If you have any recommendations of your own please let me know.

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