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I’ve been reading a couple of articles over at nice2all.com that Lyndi has written lately on the subject of SEO.  She, like me is  no expert, but unlike me, her blog has a nice PR of 4 where I am stuck (forever it seems) with a 0.

So, what is she doing differently than I?

For one thing, she writes almost exclusively about WordPress and WordPress related topics. SEO might be on the fringes of that niche, but it’s definitely there! And it’s a subject that many bloggers are concerned about but are confused and sometimes misled by the vast amounts of information and contradicting suggestions about best practices.

And she is a coder, so is able to make her blog work for her in ways that the average blogger cannot. We have to rely on a good template design and some plugins to achieve what she is able to with a couple of lines of code. And then there’s that nightmare when your template and your plugins fight with each other!

When that happens, all sorts of SEO crushers can occur!

Just like alli flushes out fat from consumed food, Google flushes out sites that have duplicate content from the sites it consumes. Sometimes our templates make it appear that we have duplicate content when we don’t  really. I know that I’ve done a review of this site and a couple of my posts come up as duplicates when they are not. I’m not going to worry to much about 2 posts out of nearly 700, but it’s still something I will keep an eye on as I don’t want that number to grow.

Having too many outgoing links can also affect your rankings in the search engines; particularly Google’s so you want to watch that also.

Lyndi mentioned using the “excerpts” field which is included in WP2.7′s post creation page by default. I confess to not having made use of this feature at all (well at least not until THIS post). And, although I tried the “more” tag, that style really didn’t suit me. I write on such a variety of subjects that anyone coming needs to choose a category to search for earlier posts on similar subjects. Of course I am using the related posts plugin which helps provide my readers with some suggestions as well as using Zemanta to provide other links to articles that might be interesting to my readers.

I’ve also limited my categories to a few rather generalized ones that most everything can fit into. While I used to have over 100 categories, I quickly learned that that was too many and some posts would fit into multiple ones, which created a boat load of duplicate content in the Goggle bot’s eyes! And that reminds me to mention to you to choose only one category for each post — see the sentence before this one for the reason

I also use the Platinum SEO Pack plugin rather than the All In One SEO plugin because it provides me with more customization such as setting a particular post meta tags to index follow(default), index nofollow, set the post to noarchive and a few other things as well.

This business of SEO is a tricky one and isn’t limited to doing or not doing paid posts. All I can says is, I’ll keep researching and trying different things and share my winners and losers with you.
Fair enough?

So what SEO tricks are you using that you feel have particuarly impacted your blog or website?

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