As a few of you may know, I do SEO in my day job and have had a bit of fun toying around with my own blog. For today’s post in Armchair BEA, I thought I’d share a few pro SEO tips to help you rank better, should you be interested in doing so! For those who aren’t aware, SEO is short for search engine optimisation and is the process of improving your site’s quality and authority to rank better in search engines. There are people who go about this very badly, called black hat SEOs (the spammers of the internet who leave annoying comments on your blogs with names like ‘play poker online’), but if your reviews and posts are genuinely good and will help others to decide what to read, there’s no reason you can’t use a few tweaks to take advantage of the stuff you’re already writing.
1. Keywords
Before you worry about your search engine rankings, you should put some thought into what exactly you want to rank for. What do you think others will be happy to find if they land on your blog from a search engine? A particular book review? A book review blog? A historical fiction blog? Choose a few terms that you think you’d like to rank higher for and make sure you actually use them somewhere in your blog’s copy. Perhaps an intro sidebar or on your ‘about me’ page.
It’s easiest to rank for what you already do on your blog. For example, I put ‘review’ in the title of all of my book review posts because it gives potential people clicking through a better idea of what they’ll get when they land here. Plus it’s easier to rank for something like ‘The White Queen review’ than it is for just ‘The White Queen’.
2. Title Tags
A title tag is the text that shows up in the tab on your browser. This post’s reads ‘Blogging about Blogging: SEO | Medieval Bookworm’. If I were serious about ranking for, say, ‘Historical Fiction Blog’, I’d stick that in there on the home page, so it would say ‘Historical Fiction Blog | Medieval Bookworm’. This is one of the more important aspects of on-site SEO, surprisingly enough, and can really make a big difference with a simple change. I am actually on the first page for ‘Historical Fiction Blog’, so I haven’t invested much in this personally, however if you all take my advice I may start. 
Title tags are easily modified through a variety of SEO plug-ins. All in One SEO Pack is a good one.
3. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is when you can find the same page on two different URLs. So when someone scrapes your site, they’ve made duplicate content out there; it’s not only theft it’s also hurting your site’s rankings. If your site is pulled using the RSS feed and published online, you’re also creating duplicate content, a real problem for those of us who have full RSS feeds.
You can also get duplicate content on your own site. If you can access the same post with two different URLs, then you have a problem. WordPress can do this if you put a post in two different categories (I actually have one here: http://medievalbookworm.com/guest-blog/guest-review-the-trinity-six-charles-cumming/ is also http://medievalbookworm.com/reviews/guest-review-the-trinity-six-charles-cumming/).
To solve this problem, keep your posts to one category wherever possible and use tags more extensively. Alternatively you can change your URL structure to remove any category parameters, but changing the URL structure on an already established blog can be difficult since you’ll have to redirect all of your own links. It’s easiest just to stick with a single category for WordPress blog if you do have it in your URL.
Please let me know if these tips were at all helpful for you and whether you’re interested in hearing more!
This is great! I have a feeling my site has horrible SEO (I can’t even get posts to show using the site-specific search engine sometimes), but whenever I’ve tried to learn more about it, I just get confused. This seems pretty easy, though.
One question: what’s the difference between tags and categories?
In WordPress categories are a higher level of classification than tags, at least the way I use them. Categories are things like reviews, while tags will be things like fiction or history. I think on Blogger you only have labels which in your case are not used in your URL.
Wow, this is helpful. My problem is that when I moved from Blogger to WordPress my labels were turned into categories. If you have any advice about remedying this, I’d be happy to hear it.
Serena´s last post …The Decadent Lovely by Amy Pence
You’re okay in terms of duplicate content because your URLs are based on dates. On WordPress you can change categories and tags around however you’d like. The best way to do it is to go into the category menu and access all of the posts in each category. Then you can edit all of the posts on the same screen through bulk actions and move them from a category to a tag. When you’ve emptied a category, you can delete it and reorganize that way.
About how many categories is too many? And I have some subcategories, are those OK, or should I change those to tags as well?
Serena´s last post …The Decadent Lovely by Amy Pence
Oh, wow, the duplicate content bit is really interesting. I hadn’t thougt about that happening from the same site. Thanks!
Pam (@iwriteinbooks)´s last post …BTT- Don’t read the Mainstream
I’m still not sure I totally understand it all. What can we do when someone scrapes our sites?
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The best way is to get them to take down the content. Usually an email works. It’s illegal for them to copy from you. What you can do for the ones you may not find ASAP is put a link to your blog in your feed stating the original source – at least then you’re getting something back. WordPress has a plugin that does this really well called RSS footer.
We’re just starting to look into all this for my works new website and it’s eye opening. Looking around at all the cheat tips sites out there it seems one of the things people don’t seem to want to get in the corporate world is your first tip, that writing relevant content that includes appropriate keywords will always bring you happier, more relevant readers.
Jodie´s last post …IMPORTANT – MY EMAIL HAS BEEN COMPROMISED
SEO is very confusing to me so I am slowly learning more. This was some very useful and easy to handle tips!
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