Saturday, May 12th, 2007 5:30 am by
jdmacor 
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These are 3 simple ways that will really improve your blog. And as the title suggests, they are extremely easy to implement… Well, the last one is a little more complicated, but still easy in some sense. They are subtle improvements, but believe me when I tell you that they can provide incredible benefits, including:
- More link love
- More links in Google
- Higher page rank
If that really is not good enough for you, then by all means, leave a comment and maybe we can talk about it… Either way, here are the tips:
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Add DoFollow
When a user leaves a comment, by default Wordpress doesn’t let Google pick up on the link to their homepage. With a very simple plugin, you can remedy this and give your commentators a nice link to help enhance their page rank. Plus it is just polite. So, go download the plugin and activate it.
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Use Clean URLs
Here is another strange default setting that Wordpress has; if you look at the address for a blog, you will notice that instead of words, Wordpress assigns numbers, letters and question marks to your pages and posts. This is neither people friendly, nor search engine friendly. To solve this issue, just read this tutorial.
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Set Your Preferred Domain
This can actually be quite the severe problem. You probably know that with your own site, you can type www.yoursite.com or just yoursite.com and it will work just fine. However Google, and other powers that be, recognize these to be 2 different domains and each can have its own page rank. They may be lower ranks individually than if you just had one. To that end, Nate Whitehill has a great tutorial, but if that is too intimidating and you have Wordpress, you can download this plugin.
12 Responses to “ 3 Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog ”
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Good tips.
Great read, I’ve just completed doing this to my new blog. I’ll be adding you as a “daily read” pretty soon. I’m having fun looking through a lot of your articles!
Keep it up!
Great tips, and thanks for the mention!
Great tips! Changing permalink structure should only be done to new blogs right? I wanna change my permalink structure but I think it’s too late for me already. I’ll definitely install the plugin for preferred domains.
Yeah, it might not be a great idea if you have a ton of posts already, because links backs would be messed up.
Nice set of tips J David! Tips #2 & #3 are nice ones to have for SEO purposes. I’ve been meaning to implement tip #1, so thanks for the reminder!
I agree with all three and an doing all three! Everyone would be wise to follow your advice.
This is great advice for anyone starting a blog or looking to gain more readers. Thank for the shout out.
J David,
Typo: #1 Link Love shoul be Linky Love
@JayPee: Wordpress keeps finding the ?p=3 kinda links, so you can change safely your permalinks 1 time to a readable URL.
If you have pictures in your posts without the complete-exact http://... URL, your pictures will not be found…
Choose the readable URL wisely, if you change the permalinks a second time again, lots of backlinks will be broken.
Great tips, and thanks for the links to the plugins!
Great tips! Done and done
Some very good tips here. As to “no follow” I would consider placing this on your archives page or maybe even installing a robots.txt to stop robots from entering the archive page. The reason for this is not to get a duplicate content tag from the SE’s. This simple step will help your site/blog to soar through the index pages and one often overlooked by bloggers.
Step 3 is the most important here I believe as some bloggers spend a lot of time and effort at free blog hosting sites that really are not SE friendly nor attract a PR then if it was on paid hosting.