This is the second part of the essential SEO tips for WordPress blogs covering the topics of Google Sitemaps plugins, pings and ping servers, valid (X)HTML, importance of a layout that puts post content ahead of sidebars and navigation, and displaying post excerpts and teaser text on the home page.

You should also check out other articles relevant to the SEO for blogs: How to Make a WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe and SEO for WordPress Part 1

Interested? Read on!

WordPress is without question the most popular stand-alone blog platform. It is flexible and customizable; there are lots of useful plugins providing any functionality a blogger can think of. However, a fresh installation of a WordPress blogs leaves a lot for improvement. For instance, search engine optimization and duplicate content proofing.

Below is a rundown of useful tips that can help improving your blog’s position in search engines as well as providing some additional benefits to your readers.

Interested? Read on!

How much blog spam is produced in 5 minutes in a quiet Sunday evening? What is the ratio of spam blogs in the most popular blog services? To answer this question I present you the results of an experiment analyzing ping data and manually reviewing blogs.

The relative ease of creating and maintaining blogs makes them ideal tools for spamming search engines. Spam blogs or splogs serve two basic purposes: making money from advertising and affiliate programs, and participating in link farms. But making money from AdSense and providing nepotistic links are not what it takes to call a blog splog. Otherwise we would have to classify all blogs showing ads or promoting a business as spam; and there are thousands popular, quality blogs that would fall into this category. The distinctive feature of a splog, however, is that it has no use for its visitors. Should Google ban a splog from AdSense and prevent its links from passing on authority – such a splog would have no more value or purpose of existence. So my definition of a splog would be “a blog with the only purpose of showing contextual or affiliate ads, or boosting link popularity of certain target sites”.

Interested? Read on!

Some blog for fun, some blog for money, some blog for both. There are numerous options to monetize a blog. AdSense ads, affiliate links, paid reviews, links to your products – you name it. If your blog receives enough visitors you can start making living online. To make the most of your visitors you must keep in mind where do they come from. Those who arrive to your blog from search engine results or directed to you by links from other websites can see your pages fully. But your revenue-generating ads and links are hidden for those who read your RSS feeds. This means that your online money-machine loses click from a substantial portion of your most loyal visitors. Is there a way to make money in RSS feeds? Yes, try ‘feedvertising’

Interested? Read on!

In one of my recent posts I wrote about the duplicate content issue. This topic is especially important to me since my blog uses the WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content. Interested? Read on!

Web 2.0 Tagging and Blogs

Do you use Web 2.0 tagging websites? Well, I do. They are so much handier than the traditional browser bookmarks! I can easily access my favorites’ list at home, at the university campus, at cyber cafes, at airports or train stations. I can always find something interesting by looking at what other people tag. By now millions of Internet users have discovered the advantages of the social web sites like Digg, Fark, Del.icio.us and others. These websites bring huge benefits to webmasters as well. When your visitors tag your content they affirm that it is actually interesting and useful. And since most of the social websites allow favorites lists sharing, or use tags as a scoring parameter to rank news entries, thousands of other members can easily discover and visit your site. So social and tagging websites are indeed a great way to promote a site. By adding links to Web 2.0 tagging resources to your posts you remind the visitors to bookmark your content. Besides, including the post url and title as parameters into the link code simplifies the task of tagging.

How can you do it in your WordPress blog? Quite easily. You don’t need to have PHP or CSS skills; although you have to understand what your Stylesheet and Main Index Template are for. Interested? Read on!