Mike’s Life

Random thoughts of an Idiot Savant

General SEO

I’ve learned quite a lot in the first year of internet marketing, one of the biggest things is SEO.  Short for search engine optimization, SEO is probably the most important tool when it comes to internet marketing.  You can build the best website in the world, with tons and tons of useful information but if no one finds it and uses it, you’ve wasted your time.

Take playsolidpoker.com, for instance.  This site is optimized, in every aspect, for the search engines.  From the url structure, to the internal linking within the site, it is completely perfect in every way.  I have, of course, used wordpress as the backbone of the site.  However, it has been tweaked so much, you can hardly notice it.

WordPress is famous for the SEO, but there are a few things that you must do to improve it even further.  Here is a short list of the most important “tweaks” for SEO purposes:

  1. Permalinks – under option, permalinks.  You must use search engine friendly urls.
  2. Title tags – wordpress needs some tweaking here, but this plugin will take care of that for you.
  3. Interlinking – the more links to your pages, the more of a chance that the SEs will find it.  This Related Posts plugin, takes care of that for you and it’s fully customizable.
  4. Other Tweaks – These are not completely required, in my opinion, but they go a long way to helping you finish the job.
    • Stattraq – an advanced blog statistics plugin
    • Most Popular Posts – a “plugin within a plugin” that uses Stattraq to display the most popular posts.

Using these plugins and doing a few tweaks will go a very long way to helping you improve your search engine rankings, thus increasing your traffic. 

August 9, 2006 - Posted by mikeslife | SEO | | 3 Comments

3 Comments »

  1. I have a site that uses wordpress and I find that the related posts plugin is not customizable enough for my needs.

    Comment by Joe | August 9, 2006

  2. I’m not sure what you mean by that, I find that plugin to very useful and customizable. You can add post excerpts, style with css, change the tags to “force” posts to be related, and control the number of related posts to be displayed.

    All in all, I think it’s a great plugin.

    Comment by Mike | August 9, 2006

  3. True, it is very customizable, just not enough for my needs. I’m also using the post image plugin and there is no way to display the post image along with the related post. I’m in the process of looking for a coder who can merge these two plugins together.

    If you know anyone…..

    Comment by Joe | August 9, 2006


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