What every blogger should know about setting up and optimising their blog

There are three separate areas of optimisation every blogger should focus on after they’ve optimally setup their blog. These are as follows, usability optimisation – the process of optimising the layout, navigation, content etc. of the blog. Performance optimisation – helping to make sure that if your blog is dugg or receives a spike in traffic it can cope and doesn’t keel over. And finally search engine optimisation – to ensure maximum exposure in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Now I don’t claim to be the definitive authority in any of these fields but I will share with you what I’ve learnt so you can take away the parts you feel are relevant and apply them to your own blogs.

This will for the most part be focused on wordpress powered blogs but some points may be relevant to all blogging platforms.

Quick Nav.

• Blog Setup
  • Domain names
  • Hosting
  • Themes
• Usability Optimisation
  • Functional footers and footer navigation
  • Calls to action and gaining RSS subscribers
  • Additional pages for blogs
  • Plugins
• Performance Optimisation
  • Wordpress optimisation
  • MySQL optimisation
  • PHP optimisation
• Search Engine Optimisation
  • Permalinks
  • Meta data
  • Linking
  • Duplicate content
  • Sitemaps
  • Analysis

Blog Setup

How you set up your blog may vary depending on your aspirations for it. If you literally just want to test the waters and experiment a little then a free service such as blogger or a wordpress hosted blog may be sensible – it may also be a good choice if your a bit of a technophobe. While setting up a blog is relatively straightforward, if words like FTP and MySQL scare you, hosting your own blog may not be practical! If, however, you have any inclination that you may take blogging even remotely seriously you will want to consider hosting your own blog and buying a domain name. Do you really want a subdomain on another brand’s website? It’s just not as professional, in my opinion.

Domain names

It’s not expensive to buy a domain or hosting. I personally buy my domains from 123-reg and a lot of other people recommend GoDaddy. It’s costs between about £2 and £20 for domain names depending on how long you register them for and what TLD you choose.

Hosting

Hosting is also cheap, many people recommend dream host, however I personally use media temple. Their hosting packages start at about $20pm for grid hosting, which is supposed to be reasonably for scaling/growing websites. Anyway, they’ve seemed pretty decent to me!

Whatever, hosting you chose, I would whole-heartedly recommend linux/apache and make sure you’re hosting supports PHP, MySQL, and mod_rewrite. I would also recommend you buy your domains separately to your hosting as it will be easier to move hosts if you want to. As with most things in life, you really get what you pay for, so shop around, read reviews, and chose what seems suitable for your budget.

Themes

Picking a decent theme for your blog can be tricky as there do seem to be a lot of pretty poor designs around. A couple of places to look would be here and here. Personally, I would skip straight to some of smashing magazine’s lists of themes as they tend to pick great ones!

If you can afford it, and what to make your blog that bit more professional and unique, think about buying or creating your own custom theme. Obviously creative talent and pocket size will determine whether that is practical.

Usability Optimisation

Usability optimisation is about optimising your blog for the users and improving their experience, it’s also about encouraging them take the actions your wish of them, such as subscribing to your RSS feeds.

Footer navigation

One thing you should do is try and create a functional footer for your blog. I would recommend at least mirroring the links from your top navigation in your footer. You can modify your footer by changing the footer.php file for your theme. If you want to improve your footer further you should consider creating a sitemap and adding a link to it. There is a plugin which auto generates sitemaps but I must admit I am yet to try it.

Calls to action

You should also add a prominent subscribe to my blog / RSS feed button in an aim to gain as many RSS subscribers as possible. The link on my blog is not the most in-your-face but it serves it’s purpose.

Additional pages on your blog

For additional pages on your blog I would suggest at a minimum an about type page – it’s a blog, it’s supposed to be more personal than a corporate website, people want to know who you are. I would also add a contact page, with a contact form – I use a contact form plugin from with rudimentary spam protection.

Useful plugins

Here are a few plugins I would recommend to improve the user experience or otherwise improve your blog. The share-this plugin provides an easy way for your readers to share your content and promote it on social networking sites. The simple tags plugin provides an easy way to add technorati style tags to your posts. I’m very much a fan of the do-follow movement as I believe it encourages and rewards participation in conversation for your readers – there’s a plugin to automatically remove nofollow tags in wordpress.

Performance Optimisation

If you do have a successful blog and perhaps one of your posts get dugg, you may find – especially if you’re using cheap hosting – that a standard wordpress install may kill your server.

Wordpress Optimisation

Out of the box, wordpress regenerates every page on the fly as a user requests it. This is pretty intense and unnecessary. There is a plugin called wp-cache, which speeds up your blog by caching the posts.

MySQL Optimisation

If you have phpmyadmin installed, to help manage your database, you can also use it to optimise your database tables automatically for you. Simply login, select your wordpress database and hit optimise (it may be wise to backup the tables first!).

You can also turn on query caching to improve the performance of your database queries. To this you will need to edit your mysql configuration file which I believe is usually somewhere around /etc/my.cnf. If you can’t find it try running the ‘locate’ command. Then either changing the line ‘query-cache-type = 0′ to ‘query-cache-type = 1′ or if that line wasn’t present just add it. Then add ‘query_cache_size = 20M’ for a twenty megabyte cache.

PHP Optimisation

You can cache compiled php scripts so they’re not recompiled every time they’re called. Two of the popular php caching scripts seem to be APC and eAccelerator.

Check out some of these other posts about performance optimising your blog for more tips.

Search Engine Optimisation

While wordpress is generally pretty search engine friendly it does have some flaws. These are explained excellently by Michael Gray in his video post about making wordpress search engine friendly.

Permalinks

Probably one of the easiest and most powerful things you can do to improve your chances in the search engines is to turn on permalinks. What this means is instead of having links like blog.com?p=1 they will become blog.com/my-awesome-blog-post. This is much preferable for both humans and search engines alike. Just go into your options and find the permalink section. I like just using the post title for my permalinks other wise they can get a bit long with categories or dates as well. You may also have to fiddle with your .htaccess file to get them to work.

Meta Data

In a default install wordpress uses really poor meta data and one of the first things you will want to do is install a plugin that allows you to edit the meta data of each post and page. While meta data is by no means a huge factor in search engine success it’s still a quick and easy thing you can do to help. I personally use a plugin called another wordpress meta plugin, although I believe it’s been superseded by another plugin called all in one seo pack but I’m yet to try that.

Linking

Links are a very important factor when search engines try to decide how authoritative and powerful your blog is. If you know people with authoritative (high page rank) websites and blogs – beg them for a link! You want to build up as many natural links to both your homepage and individual posts. This can be achieved by writing high quality link worthy articles. Check out the recent post on seomoz about the emotions of linking. Try submitting your high quality posts to social networking sites such as digg, reddit, stumbleupon and sphinn. If they’re a hit, as well as getting a traffic rush, you’ll also likely recieve a load of natural inbound links.

On top of inbound links it’s also important to think about interlinking and linking out. Interlinking is linking from one post to other posts on your blog. This helps share the link juice around your blog. For example if you have a heavily linked to article, you can link through to some of your less linked to articles and some of the link juiced will be passed to these pages. There are two methods for interlinking that I like. You see a lot of blogs where they show a link to the previous and next post for every post – that’s pretty cool. However, I prefer the method of showing a list of related posts as this can help pass link juice and I feel is more beneficial to the reader.

Linking out is important for getting people to take notice of your blog and will possibly encourage them to link back. It may help you gain goodwill with other bloggers, which you can use to further your relationship with them. Perhaps by interviews, guest posts etc.

Duplicate content

If you watched the video post above you’ll be aware that there are duplicate content issues with wordpress. What this means is that the same content can be found in numerous places within your blog. For example, on a wordpress blog created with no thought about search engine optimisation a typical post could be found by google in the following places:

• homepage
• post page
• date page
• category page(s)

To avoid this kind of situation you should try and make sure each post is only in one category and you should also use a robots.txt file to stop google indexing the date and category pages. You should also make extensive use of the <!--more--> tag so you only show small snippets of your posts on your homepage.

Keywords

When you’re writing your posts and especially when chosing titles, as well as trying to appeal to visitors by grabbing their attention, it’s also important to think about the keywords people might use to find your pages. It’s important to sprinkle relevant keywords throughout your posts and in your titles but without resorting to keyword stuffing and other spammy techniques.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps can help Google and other search engines find the different pages and posts within your website. There is a handy plugin for auto generating a sitemap every time you write a new post or page.

Analysis

Analysis is very important for a number of reasons. Firstly it helps to measure the success of your blog – unique daily visitors etc. And from an SEO perspective it can show a number of things. It can show you what sources are driving traffic and it can also show you what keywords are driving organic search traffic. This can be useful for writing more posts around similar themes, to try and capitalise on this traffic and increase your visitors. It’s pretty easy to add Google Analytics tracking to your footer.php file, which then provides you with decent, free analytics. I wrote an article about setting up Google Analytics if you need more information.

Check out these posts about wordpress and SEO for more information.

If you want more of an overview of general SEO I would recommend getting a copy of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Also check out SEOmoz.

[tags]wordpress, seo, usability, blogging, optimisation[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Blog critque – worldofangel.com
2. Why I love the more tag
3. In the news – 05/08/07
4. To run a successful blog you need to invest time
5. Relative vs. absolute links revisited

Tagged as: blogging, seo, wordpress