How to build this blog 9: Search Engine Optimisation and Site Traffic

Just to let you know, some of the plugins on this page need a bit of technical knowledge to get going, however, they come with great instructions and the information is invaluable so go for it.

Google webmasters tools

As with AdSense take the easy rout and sign up to google webmasters tools. This is a another free service to help you get the most out of the search engine by diagnosing problems with your site that will effect your rankings. The main features revolve around the robots.txt file which helps organise the bots that catalogue websites for search engines and the XML sitemap which lists pages on your site to be catalogued.

XML Sitemap Plugin

Once again, I rather not do all this manually so a quick look about reveals the XML Sitemap plugin (developer blog) which will also deal with my robots.txt. This plugin will rewrite and resubmit the sitemap and robots.txt every time I make a post. It does not just inform Google, it will tell Ask.com, Yahoo.com and MSN too. The obligatory donation goes out for saving me so much time and effort.

Search Engine Optimisation Plugin

With all this information being sent out to the search engines it is a good idea to play nice with them. For this the SEO plugin (developer blog) helps to organise all the information that search engines like to read e.g. Page titles, descriptions, keywords, meta tags, etc

Feedburner

As feedburner like to say…Publicize, Optimize, Analyze, Monetize and Troubleshoot.

Feedburner has some great features, here are a few of them:

And here is the plugin info, I have added the feedburner rss icon and subscribe by email links to the right sidebar.

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June 21, 2008 | Filed Under blogging 

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