There are many benefits to publishing a business blog and improved search engine visibility is one of the most popular.  It’s pretty common advice to hear: start a blog and the fresh content will attract links, improving your search results.  Such tactical advice can be very effective.

Unfortunately, the advice gets filtered and distorted, not unlike what happens in the game “telephone” kids play. Pretty soon one or more blogs are implemented for the sole purpose and expectation of improving search engine visibility and nothing else. At least nothing else that’s accountable.

What’s wrong with this picture?   Blogs started solely for SEO objectives will inevitably fail.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. Lack of planning and oversight - After the honeymoon of starting a blog wears off, those tasked with writing content often get distracted by their other responsibilities. Bit by bit, posts look less and less like keyword optimized web pages and sink back to the familiar writing styles common to public relations and corporate marketing. Gone are the keywords that consumers are searching on. Gone is the traffic that used to come from search engines. Read more…

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• Tips to enhance your WordPress blog SEO

1 - Optimize your title tag

In terms of SEO, the title tag is one of the most important things: In fact, the title appears as a link in search engines results and social bookmarking sites. Unfortunely, most WordPress themes displays the title tag in a non-optimized way. I had recently written a tutorial here at Cats Who Code to obtain a really SEO-friendly title tag.

2 - Create an archive page

In my opinion, all blogs should have an archive page: It allows your readers to quickly browse your blog and find what they’re looking for, and this page is also very good for SEO. Some months ago, I wrote a tutorial on wphacks.com, showing you how you can easily create this kind of page, with or without the help of a plugin.

3 - Use the correct H tag structure (h1, h2, h3..)

When I download free WordPress themes, I’m often scared to see how badly the H structure is used: h2 are everywhere. In order to get the best SEO results possible, you should use the correct structure:

• h1 for the post title
• h2 for inside titles
• h3 for inside subtitles
• and so on…

4 - Use a good permalink structure

If you’re not using permalinks yet, don’t even ask why do you get so bad results from search engines. Permalinks is a complete must have.
To enable permalinks, go to the “Customize Permalink Structure” page in your Wordpress Admin :Dashboard>Options>Permalinks and choose a permalink structure.

In my opinion, you should choose “custom” and use one of the following structures:

/%postname%/%post_id%
/%post_id%
/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%

5 - Increase your Pagerank by leaving comments on other blogs

Having backlinks is really important, in terms of SEO. But, especially if your blog is quite new, having quality backlinks isn’t always easy. The solution is to leave (relevant, of course) comments on blog who don’t use the rel=”nofollow” attribute, or have the Top Commentators widget, or even Comment Luv.
Some times ago, I have compiled a list of 250+ links to get free backlinks. You should definitely check it out, and leave some comments!

6 - Install the “ALL In One SEO Pack” plugin

In my opinion, All In One SEO Pack is one of the best ever WordPress plugins: It allows you to enable meta descriptions and keywords, avoid duplicate content by noindexing pages as such as categories or tags, and tweak titles. Read more…

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