• Sharebar

OK. This is the second part of my series on setting up your blog (CLICK HERE if you missed Part 1), specifically targeted at the online network marketer. This section will deal with optimizing your blog for the search engines by properly setting up your permalinks as well as some vital plug-ins and how to set those up. I sincerely hope that this helps some of you out there with your network marketing blog as I have needed to learn this piecemeal throughout the course of the past few months!

RSS FEED: Get an RSS Feed URL from Feedburner for your blog. This allows readers of your blog to subscribe and receive updates automatically via email.

Privacy: Be sure to go the “Privacy” section of your Settings and check the box that allows your blog to be seen by the search engines!

Permalinks: You will want to go to the “Permalinks” section of your Settings and choose “Custom” and input this: /%postname%/. This will make your post urls make sense and contain the title or key words about the post. You can edit your permalinks after you write a post. (PS. I unfortunately also included “category” in my permalinks settings and there’s no turning back for me! Live and learn!)

All-In-One SEO: This WordPress plug-in is highly recommended, even if your blog says that it is already SEO optimized. It think it’s the most important of all the plug-ins for helping your site get optimized for the search engines. Some important information for setting up All-In-One SEO:

  • Home Title – Include Your Name and a Keyword (if possible). You want to dominate the search engines for your name. If your name is John Smith…you may have to try harder!
  • Home Description – Include Your Name in this description as well.
  • Home Keywords – Do not include more than 10.
  • Page Title and Title Attribute – Each page of your site needs to be set up. Your title is what appears in the top left of your screen when you are on a page. Include keywords, your name, etc. I set these up with the same information.
  • Page Keywords – again, no more than 10 and should be relevant to the content on that page
  • Page Menu Label – this is what will read on the drop down menu of your site. Just include what you want it to say…for example my title attribute is “About Steve Hawk” because I want my entire name seen by the search engines but my menu label reads “About Steve”.

XML SiteMap: Notifies Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask about updates to your blog. You will need to set this up  so that the search engine spiders can crawl your site. In layman’s terms, this plug-in makes your site readable by the search engines.

Askimet: This plug-in manages your comments and includes a spam filter.

OnlyWire: This plug-in is great if you are using an article marketing strategy. All you need to do is click a button and your blog post will be uploaded to 30 different social media sites including Facebook, Digg, Mixx to name a few.

TweetMeme: This plug-in allows you or your readers to click on a button on your post and have it published on Twitter.

SEO Friendly Images: This plug-in makes all of the images on your site SEO friendly. Images can have a negative effect on search engine rankings because they can’t be read by the spiders. SEO Friendly Images makes the code of your images readable to the spiders.

I’m sure that there is much more to know about properly optimizing your website but this will give you a good start and put you ahead of the majority of your competition. As I learn more, I will be posting that information here.

Until next time…happy blogging!

Your Partner in Success,

Steve Hawk