10 Advanced Techniques to Improve Your Blog

Once you’ve established a blog, you can use it for many purposes, including improvement of the search engine ranking of your company’s web site. To do so, here are 10 useful techniques you should consider to set your blog apart from the standard cookie-cutter variety.

1) Move your blog from an external host to an internal component of your web site.

WordPress.org offers the best software to do so with a step-by-step instruction sheet that boasts of a “five-minute” installation process.

Blogs on external hosts boost the vendor’s web site instead of your own. Using an internal blog will help your entire site benefit from both inbound links to the blog and from an increased volume of web pages.

2) Use the “sociable” plug-in to create icons linking to social media sites at the end of each blog post.

Plug-ins are created by outside experts to increase the functionality of your blog. WordPress.org is famous for having more plug-ins than any other program, and you can access them directly from the software. Each plug-in contains its own installation and activation instructions but adding them is relatively easy.

The sociable plug-in provides a slew of social media sites, and the user can just click on the ones he wishes to appear at the end of each post. This improves the marketing of your blog as visitors can easily spread interesting entries to entirely new audiences.

3) Use the “All in one SEO” plug-in to improve the search engine ranking of your posts.

Blog writers experience a dilemma. To maximize readership, they need cute, interesting blog headlines, but these headlines are not always the best for SEO purposes. The All-in-One-SEO plug-in lets you create more topical blog titles and descriptions of the content.

4) Activate the Askimet plug-in that comes with WordPress.org software.

This plug-in provides a filter to prevent spam comments to your blog.

5) Reduce duplicate content created by blog programs.

A category archive is sufficient for visitors to look up blog content. Any chronological archives should be deleted.

6) Use a Google Sitemap Generator.

Sitemaps in general help Google spiders to navigate your web pages. But it is next to impossible to keep your sitemaps updated with the constant addition of material to blogs, especially because each entry appears to the spider as an entirely new web page.

The Google Sitemap Generator is a plug-in that keeps your XML sitemap up to date after each blog post.

7) Always update your blog with the latest version of WordPress.org software and the latest version of any plug-ins you may be using.

WordPress.org will automatically notify you when new versions are available.
Always back up both your WordPress files and your WordPress data base as frequently as possible, and especially before upgrading the software.

WordPress files are simply saved by using an FTP program to move them from your hosting program to the hard drive of your computer. Saving the WordPress database (MySQL) is a little more complicated, but it can be facilitated by activating another plug-in called WP – php My Admin. Go to the plug-in home page for step-by-step instructions.

9) Change the permalink structure on your dashboard.

Permalinks stand for “permanent links,” and they refer to the URL generated for each new blog entry. Go to the permalinks option on your dashboard, click on “custom structure,” and add the code /%postname%/. This will eliminate useless information in the URL such as the date and the name of your blog.

10) Improve your blog URLs by adding a post-slug plug-in to your blog.

The post-slug plug-in will improve the permalink even more by deleting short words in your entry headlines. For example instead of “the-cure-for-cancer.com,” a post slug will change the URL to “cure-cancer.com,” much better for SEO purposes.

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A Harvard graduate with more than 10 years of PR experience, Willy Gissen founded Cut-It-Out Communications (http://www.cioediting.com) in 2003. For related articles, visit http://www.cioediting.com/media_content_provision.asp