Copyright 2008 Mike Paetzold

There are three easy things you can do to improve the optimization of your WordPress blog. You will want to do this because it will improve the speed your blog gets indexed and help you to rank higher for your keywords. The first is adding the proper plug-ins, the second is to change the permalinks, and the third is to claim your blog.

Adding plug-ins

There are a couple plug-ins that you should use on every WordPress blog. One of them is All-In-One-SEO.. You also need to add the Google-XML-Sitemap plug-in along with a tagging plugin. There are multiple tagging plugins and the pluses and minuses of each would be a complete article by themselves.

All-In-One-SEO plug-in allows you to change the title tags for each post. Individual title tags will cause a huge improvement in your rankings over the default WordPress uses of using the same title tag across the whole blog. The site map plug-in creates a compliant site map and updates it automatically for easier indexing on all of the major search engines. Finally proper use of tags will allow you to categorize your posts and get multiple rankings within the search engine rankings..

Change Permalinks

It is easy to change the permalinks on a WordPress blog. Login to your dashboard, click settings, click on permalinks. This will allow you to change your permalinks from a URL of http://yourdomain.com/?p=123 to something more SEO friendly, Using a URL like http://yourdomain.com/category(with your keyword)/post title(again with your keywords there). You can do this by using the custom url with these tags ” /%category%/%postname%/”.There are also other tags available to allow you to create what works best for you.

Google Webmaster Tools and Technorati

You should be using both Google Webmaster Tools and Technorati. Make sure that you submit your blog through the Google Webmaster tools and claim it properly per their instructions. This will be done either by FTPing a special file or creating a special post. Google will now tell you any problems they have indexing your blog when you check back.

Claiming your blog at Technorati also is important. This will allow you to link your tags to Technorati and have them show in your account. This allows you another way to track any problems with the way your blog is being indexed.

In summary, these three steps can improve the optimization of your blog for all on page factors. For me personally, these simple changes have sped up the indexing of my blog significantly and have helped to improve the ranking of the posts too.

Mike Paetzold

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About the Author: Mike Paetzold is an avid blogger and recognized expert on using WordPress. You can find even more tips on making your WordPress blog search engine friendly in “7 Tips To Make Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly” or at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

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Technorati Tags: improve seo, Mike-Paetzold, seo, wordpress seo

Here is today’s question from the Q and A call.

My question is can you have more than one blog on one domain? Like www.yourdomain.com/blog/ and then have another blog at www.yourdomain.com/wdbog/ ? Is this possible or should someone get different domains for each blog?

This is a good question which is why I wanted to answer it here.

The answer is yes you can have more than one blog on a domain. Now for the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. One other thing I would recommend that you use sub domains instead of a folder if you are going to use multiple blogs. This means your url would be http://blog.mydomain.com even though the files would go in a folder on the server the same way. The search engines treat the sub domains as a different site and tend to index the separately.

Now let’s look at why you would want multiple blogs on the same domain and when it probably isn’t a good idea.

If your main domain is on a broad topic like dogs and you wanted separate blogs on

• Greyhounds
• Dachshunds
• German Shepherds
• etc

That would work because you would be getting keyword rich domains like http://greyhounds.mydogsite.com that are related.

Now if you had a golf domain and wanted other blogs on topics like

• Race car driving
• Stop smoking
• Model airplanes
• etc

This wouldn’t work.

As always you can let me know what you think good or bad and ask your questions by commenting or using the survey form.

Mike Paetzold

Tags: blog questions, blogging, Mike Paetzold, multiple blogs, subdomains, wordpress questions

Technorati Tags: blog-questions, blogging, Mike-Paetzold, multiple-blogs, subdomains, wordpress-questions

The replay is available of last nights call. Not sure how long it will be up so take the tiome to grab it right away.

WordPress Q and A Replay

Hope you enjoy it.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blogging, Mike-Paetzold, wordpress

I just reopened WordPress Lessons.

If you are looking for special coaching on using WordPress blogs for your marketing this will probably be the last course this year.

===> WordPress Lessons

I will show you the proper way to:

• set up your blog
• monetize it
• generate traffic for it
• and you get direct access to me

Here is what past students have said:

“If you are wanting to set up a profitable blog then Mike’s Word Press Lessons are a must. Mike helped me set up my blog and I am amazed with the results. I can post on almost any topic and reach top 10 in google within hours. I have also been able to double my optin list and income utilizing his strategies.
Thank You Mike!!! ”

Jack sShafer
hitpiratemarketing.com

“I’m so glad I found Mike’s program. He has given us detailed access to insider information on how to monetize our blogs that I would have never found out otherwise. He even provided all the tools and talked us through how to use them., His friendly and accessible style, and the fact that we can actually talk with him directly on the calls/webinars and by email/forums made his seminar especially enjoyable and productive. Without his help, I would have never dared to even try to get a blog up, and now I’ve got one up and running, and I’m working on several additional ones.”.

Elisabeth Kuhn
myfavoriteselfhelpstuff.com

Class size is limited to 20 people and 3 of those spots have been filled from the waiting list.

This will start on October 17th and the last time it sold out in 6 days. It will close on October 13th regardless of the number of students.

===> WordPress Lessons

If you are serious about using the power of blogs in your marketing this is for you.

The power of blogs is that I still get paid every day for work I did 3, 6, 9 months ago.

===> WordPress Lessons

Technorati Tags: Mike-Paetzold, WordPress-Lessons