Running a Wordpress Blog? I’ve Got Some Required Reading For You

I’ll just start off by saying that I’m a fan of Joost de Valk and the Yoast blog.  Second to that, I’ll admit that I’m about a week late on getting this blog post out.  Doh!  Regardless, last week Joost posted a slide presentation titled 40 Wordpress Optimisation Tips.  If you run a Wordpress blog, this should be required reading!

Wordpress can be a powerful weapon in your arsenal, especially when you’re blogging as part of your SEO strategy.  But for the uninitiated, Wordpress is full of pitfalls, SEO-unfriendly plugins/options and offers users a dizzying array of ways to go overboard (and potentially damage your blog’s overall success).  The 40 tips offered up at Yoast are broken down into specific areas like Analytics, social media, SEO and plugins.  Each section is important, and many of the elements compliment each other – so don’t dismiss any of them!

Here’s just a sampling of the overall list (my cherry-picked favorites):

• Page titles?  They should be listed as “post title – blog name” – in that order.
• Utilize Robots and Noindex directions to ensure the search engines properly crawl and index your blog’s content.
• Always write custom meta descriptions.  According to Joost, you should never let Wordpress plugins automate this process.
• Do you back up your blog’s files?  You should!  Not only that, but you should back up your files and your database(s).
• Encourage social media submission of your content.  Sphinn it, Tweet it, Digg it – there are plenty of flavors to share.
• Use Analytics, and use the Yoast Analytics plugin (trust me, it’s a sinch!).
• Oh – and a note on Goals in Google Analytics: track comments and RSS subscriptions.

Obviously, the full list is much more comprehensive, but these points popped out at me as being very relevant and very important.  If you find that you either didn’t know one of the points listed above or aren’t following them presently – there’s a GREAT chance that you’re well off the radar for the other 33 tips on the original list!  I’d highly suggest you review the slideshow, take notes and get to work optimizing your Wordpress blog.  Happy tweaking (and big thanks to Joost and his great advice)!