Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme. The posting date should never be within an H1 tag, because you’re NOT trying to rank well in the engines for a date. Instead, wrap […]

A “sticky” post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. The “sticky” feature is available in some blog systems by default (e.g. Blogger.com) and in others through the use of a plugin (e.g. the Adhesive plugin for WordPress). Why would you ever want to make a post sticky? Because […]

This one’s so basic yet so critical to SEO success: make sure that within your blog template you link to the blog post’s permalink URL from the title of the post. That will provide you with much better (contextual) anchor text than the word “Permalink” will. What’s wrong with the word “permalink”? Nothing, if that’s […]

Having a Related Posts feature on your blog creates more interconnections between blog posts, which is a good thing as it passes around more link gain (e.g. PageRank). I recently installed the Contextual Related Posts plugin on my blog, so now you’ll be able to see that each permalink page lists related posts at the […]

A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon. I can’t believe how few bloggers do this. I’m not talking about Technorati tags, although those are useful too. I’m talking about using a plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is exactly the plug-in I installed to create tag pages like this one. So […]

Dynamic URLs can impede the search engine spiders from fully spidering and indexing your blog. Err on the side of caution and use “rewritten” URLs. The excellent (and free!) blogging software WordPress supports URL rewriting, so you can have nice, search engine friendly URLs. Better still, the WordPress URLs contain hyphens rather than underscores (like […]

From an search engine optimization perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. It gets the most weight by the search engines. Most blogs don’t have search engine optimal title tags. (Heck, most sites in general don’t have optimal title tags!) The best title tag is one that LEADS with the […]

Here’s a really cool SEO tool: Webmaster Eyes. It rivals the usefulness of the handy SEO-Links, a Firefox extension which I’ve blogged about before. Webmaster Eyes reveals the PageRank scores of all links on a page. Just specify a URL and the page is displayed with a PageRank score overlayed onto each link.

I’ve never had much faith in the estimated number of search results returned by Google (for good reason). Every so often I run queries that I know will return the largest results set possible and I note the number of pages found. For example: searching for “the” and “http”. And boy do the supposed number […]

Today I presented at the Search Engine Strategies conference on the “Blog and Feed Search SEO” panel. I spoke on optimization tips and tactics for blogs and for RSS feeds. I had to pack in a lot of material into a short amount of time, but I managed! We got some great questions in the […]