This week I’ve been carry out some much needed SEO work on Blogstorm to make sure the site has everything in place to continue to rank well in 2008. Here are some of the tips you can follow to make your site rank higher this year.
Carry out a site audit
Visit Google and do a search for site:yoursite.com. The only pages that come up should be your post/article pages and any other high quality pages people might want to find. You shouldn’t have archives, search pages, category pages, tag pages or any other pages that are unlikely to rank highly on Google. Remove them from the index using the following meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
Stop keyword cannibalisation
Many large blogs such as and Engadget link to their category pages such as http://www.engadget.com/tag/iphone/ from every iPhone related post. Notice how the tag page doesn’t rank when you search for “iPhone” but a real article ranks in 6th place? That’s because Google wants to rank stories highest and not category pages. If Engadget was to link all posts about the iPhone to a real page instead then they would rank second. If they did the same with all products the effect would be huge.
Carry out some keyword research and figure out what pages you want to rank highly and then make sure any other post referencing that topic is linked to the target post. For example if I wanted this page to rank for the query htaccess I would find every page on my blog mentioning the word “htaccess” and turn each word into a link to the target article.
Optimise your results
Look back at the keywords that have been sending you the most traffic and examine the search results for those keywords. If you aren’t number 1 then point a few more links at the page to improve your rankings.
Next look at the other results compared to yours. Is your title appealing to searchers? Does the snippet make people want to click? Are you even writing about the subject people are looking for?
Change your titles
A blog post title has to fulfil several roles. In the first week it has to attract as many readers and links as possible and maybe get traffic from social media. After that you should look to changing the title to target certain keywords. For example you might publish the “Top 10 Best Methods to Fix an iPhone” which would be good for getting traffic but not so good for ranking. As Graywolf said earlier this week you should look to changing your page title to “Fix an iPhone – Top 10 Methods” but keep the h1 tag as it was before.
Promote top pages
Check your logs to find the most popular pages on your site. Have they all been submitted to StumbleUpon and Digg? Try submitting them with social media friendly titles and see if you can make them even more popular.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
My top keyword has given me just short of 750 visits (745 of them from Google) this month and I am on page 3 near the bottom in Google for that one. Your comments make me think I am missing out on a HECK of a lot of traffic.
I regularly try to audit things on my site as I make 1 change then a week later I spot that it broke something else. I find it’s good to write down and log any changes, when they were made and why they were made. One example is a change to my htaccess file… I then made a change in wordpress which reset it back to default and I spotted later that all my 301’s were not working (dupe content).
this definitely makes a lot of sense, and is a no nonsense approach, which i like
I think categories should be retained. That is if you provide a summary of the post along with a link to the article.
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I do still advise that people keep categories, just don’t let search engines index them.
More comments from Patrick AltoftI am of the opinion that it is ok to provide a summary with a link to post and let the search engines index them.
But you are the expert here.
Hi there am new to SEO and have nv use before do u have any recommandation for me to start learning … I have a blog but usually use adwords to rank myself ….
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Make sure you use Wordpress and read http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress-seo/
More comments from Patrick AltoftI’m not sure I buy the point about hiding category pages. In principle, they should be great, for search engines and readers alike. In particular, they’re more up-to-date than individual posts, if you write on subjects where that matters (and I do).
CAM
@ Matthew
Good for you that you have suceeded with this king of strategy
@ Patrick
I was nice article.. Basic but good.. “”Promote top pages”" ,, I did not think of promoting my top pages.. Nice tips
I agree that they are great for readers as it helps them find what they want in an organised way. But, if you let Google index those pages then it’s just duplicate content of what’s in your post pages which doesn’t help. Also I bet 99.9% or probably 100% of your inbound links from other sites hit your post pages and not categories. That is the reason (I believe) that you are wise to block them with robots.txt or by adding the nofollow meta tag.
However I do have a question for you Patrick on a similar thing that confuses me a little. Sitelinks have recently been showing up in the webmaster control panel for my site. Ideally I would have thought that google using category links would have been more appropriate, but instead the sitelinks are showing up for Page 2 (which is understandable as it’s on the main page) and sitelinks show up for 4 popular posts that have a number of links hitting them.
So, with out letting Google index category pages, would I be right in thinking that categories would never show up in sitelinks on a search for gadgetvenue? Or could I still build links to my category pages from external sites to give sitelinks a boost even if google wont index those pages?
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I doubt Google will use pages that are noindexed in the sitelinks so that should work.
I wouldn’t recommend blocking category pages using robots.txt as that will mean any PR they accumulate can’t be passed on to the pages they link to.
More comments from Patrick AltoftI best go make changes quickly
Thanks for the tip.
Great thoughts, Patrick. As a blogger, it’s always a good idea to keep these 5 simple ideas in mind when posting and managing my blog. I’m going to share this post on my team reading list.
It probably is indeed the case that the external links to my category pages are few in number, and furthermore are either minor or nofollowed. Even so, with judicious use of the MORE separator, I’ve created category pages that are much more keyword rich than most of my post pages, and that don’t fully duplicate most of my better posts.
One factor for me is that the way I write, it is more natural to have high keyword density early in post, or throughout a short post, than it is in a longer one. On the other hand, my longer ones are commonly better.
OK. I’m awake now. Off to deal with the big merger news.
CAM
Thanks for the input Patrick!
You did a good job! Simple, yet informative.
Stop keyword cannibalisation <– great tip cheers
I have a 6 months old blog and the same as listed on your tips. i always promote top pages and I change my page title to target certain keywords and yes! its working..
Really useful tips for bloggers. All 5 points are nice.
–Jegastar
thanks for the tips.. i will implement them in my new blog.. i really want to get a thousand visits a day at least.
Nice work dude… It is helpful for me as well as others..
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