It’s all about Usability!

I started my blog 28 days ago “from the date of this post” as an interest in self experiencing the very different SEO Practices and figuring out it’s good/Bad effects on blogs or sites in general.

My Main Goal is Google in all my experiments, following Yahoo and MSN in a low priority for now…

I’ll be posting a special report on how the blog is doing while testing some SEO practices whether it is a good or a bad practice, that will be coming soon on a section called “The lab” that i’ll be posting soon.

Heads up on what’s going on right now with my blog:

It’s been 28 days so far and i got around 50 links indexed, the good stuff are that my blog is comming in the 1st 3 SERPs and Mostly 1st and 2nd using 2 or more key phrases! and access to my blog is coming from Google Organic results.

The Strategy:

There are several points that you need to put in mind if you want to ensure Google caring about your site, not necessarily to have it all but most of it can be useful and could return more benefit to your blog/site. Below is a list or some recommended points to have:

.htaccess Redirection

Make sure you use 1 domain name for your blog and if one domain then make sure of redirecting the www level of your domain name to the domain-name.com level or vice versa… You can do this by using .htaccess or some other plug-in to do the trick, i personally use .htaccess.

Robots.txt and Robots META

Pay attentions to Robots.txt and the way you use it! Miss using it could cause you loosing some important indexing opportunities, you can block certain directories or files from SE bots, but still! some SPAM bots uses the content of your Robots.txt to index and abuse the links / paths to content that you don’t want to be indexed or reveled! Paying attention to robots META tags is also important.

XML Sitemaps

Or in other words “Google Sitemaps”. Having a valid XML sitemap structure that is following the Google Sitemaps structure “which later on will be a Global rule to be followed by other search engines” would be so helpful for you and Google at the same time. This practice will help Google indexing your site properly and efficiently and at the same time gives you the opportunity to track Google’s activity on your blog and see what’s happening and what needs to be done.

For this you should have a Google Sitemaps account and use the Google Sitemap Generator plug-in for word press.

Clean URLs & Slugs

You should be using optimized Post/Page slugs for every Post/Page on your blog. You can do this manually or leave word press do, It usually takes the entire Post title and put is as a post slug and same with pages. so you better do it manually and clean it from any noise words! as there are limitations for URL length. Anyways URLs are not a major ranking factor, in fact some SEOs says it is very minor, It is basically click through factor. But still! you have to make sure your URLs are releveant to the page content and keyword rich.

On my blog you can see some post slugs that are very long and having lots of noise words, I left it like that as a part of my experiment checkout the Nikon D200 Post.

Page Titles

Again! This is one of the main factors that Google depends on to list your site in SERPs, your titles should be Descriptive, Short, Clean and uses keywords that are related or relevant to your content. having all that in one Page title is easy and the revenue will be great. You can update this manually in case you want to optimize your page titles or use some Wordpress plug-ins that “mass” this for you. All in one SEO or SEO Title Tag can do the needful!

Post Excerpts

This can act as a page description as well if not for Google, using it can save you facing content duplicates problems while using an automated excerpt from the same content of your main post.

Post Linking / Inbound Linking

You can do that to increase the internal linking to related content from different posts, good for both search engines and visitors to increase page views and for easier access.

RSS Feeds

Feeds are very important from an SEO perspective when people learn to syndicate your content with or without your permission. It is also useful to keep frequent readers coming to your blog and will provide easier access to your articles using many ways thus maintaining returning visitors to your blog.

Tags and Tag Clouds

Tags are an important Factor in SEO, it is a reason to increase your page indexation and provide related content to your various content. It can also be considered as keywords when you use the Tags output as a META keywords input which will help other SE and Directories that still uses META Keywords to properly get your content.

404 Error Page

This Page is important to direct SE to understand that a page in not available / Not Found! a good usage of of this page can be using the search string to show related content on the 404 Page although the main content is not found, but still you can keep the visitor on your blog to find something relevant.

There are still so many other factors that can optimize your blog which i couldn’t talk about here, Over time i can update this post with extra points to your benefit! If you have anything extra to say, please share your thoughts and comment.

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