Having a blog is more than just posting everyday. It’s about being seen, not only by people but by search engines as well. Most people use social bookmarking sites to drive traffic to their blogs, but after a few weeks the traffic dies and the blog posts are never seen again. With a few simple plugins and tweaks to wordpress, you can help keep traffic to your blog by optimizing it for the search engines while still writing for your visitors.

Plugins for Search Engines

A blog needs loving from the search engines too. Since a wordpress blog is created dynamically, it is harder for it to rank on the search engines. This is because the coding is meant to be customized and read by the designer, rather than a search engine. The following plugins will help increase your ranking by utilizing simple SEO tactics. This could be the difference between your blog being on the third page of Google or the first page.

It is best if you use some sort of analytic software to track traffic. I prefer Google Analytics because it is a very powerful tool and best of all it’s free.

1. SEO Title Tag
Gets rid of the “blog name >> archive >> post title” and puts the post title as the title of page. This plugin will show the search engine a unique title for each page and with the right keywords, you can keep your traffic going long after the social bookmarking website’s traffic is gone.

2. Head Meta Description
Allows you to add a brief description about each post which will be included in the Meta description. This is a basic SEO tactic.

3. Google Sitemap
Creates an XML sitemap that is automatically submitted to Google and updates it every time you make a new post. This plugin requires you to make an account with Google. Google webmaster tools allow you to see when the last time Google bot has crawled your website.

4. Jerome’s Keywords
Allows you to add keywords for every post, which will be included in the Meta data. This is another basic SEO tactic.

5. WP-Cache
Will make loading time for your blog much quicker, so that visitors don’t have to wait.
Note: Activate this plugin last, because it is very difficult to test the look and feel of your blog with this on since it does not allow your browser to refresh.

Plugins for Visitors

So you have good content and tons of traffic, now what? Keep your visitors entertained by having them interact with your blog. With the help of these plugins and good content, your visitors will never want to leave.

6. WP-Post-Rating
Allows the visitor the rate your post. This will tell you what topics are popular with your blog’s visitors. So now you can write better content on topics that your visitors enjoy.

Scuba Sewj has that going on:

7. WP-Contact Form
Allows you to add a contact form almost anywhere on your blog, this gives your visitors a quick and easy way to contact you. Some visitors might have an idea for a good topic, some might want to become writers on your blog and some visitors might want to spam your site or write you nasty letters on how much they hate your blog. All this feedback will help you be more in tune with your audience. Remember to have a reason why you want people to contact you.

The boys at Strictly Lunch have the perfect example of this:

8. WP-Related Post
Shows other related post (i.e. if your post is on weight loss and you wrote another post about low fat diets, this plugin will show a link to the low fat diets post). This will help raise your pageviews. After all you don’t want visitors to just look at one page and then leave.

Example:

9. WP-Email
Will put “email this post” link on the bottom of post. This makes it easy for your visitor to share this post with their friends (that friend could fall in love with your blog and could be your number one fan).

Example:

Modifying Wordpress Settings

10. Permalink Rewrite
This will change your url to include your category name and your post name (which should include some keywords). To do this go to the “Options” tab then the “Permalink” tab, click on “Custom Specify Below” and change it to this: “/%category%/%postname%/”

Example:

11. Add Title Attributes and Alt Tags
For every picture or file you upload, add the “Title” and “Description” (Use keywords).

And for every link you have be sure to write a “Title” (use keywords).

12. HTML Validator
When you are done modifying your blog be sure to run it through a html validator, this will tell you if your site has any errors in the coding. If it has errors fix them.

13. RSS Feed
Make sure to have an RSS feed and a bold icon that is above the fold./p>

The boys at Pronet Advertising got it right.

Their RSS stands out and is above the fold.

Customize Your Theme

There are hundreds of thousands of free themes out there, there are also millions of bloggers. That means the free theme you are using is probably being used by tons of other people. So customize the color scheme of theme. It is quite simple to do and it will make a big difference on the look and feel of your blog.

14. Remove Commented Coding
Once you are done with all customizations to your theme go back and remove all commented code. All the coding behind “/*” and in front of “*/” are commented code. This code is just there for the webmaster/designer.

Example:

If there any questions about installing these plugins or making these modifications, feel free to email me at Sujan (at) Sewj (dot) com.

Note: please do not try to install these plugins if you have no knowledge in html or php.