Any search engine optimization (SEO) expert or enthusiast will tell you  WordPress.org is the foundation for a photographer that wants to get optimal traffic from Google for a blog. You won’t reach nirvana by preaching the blogger.com, wordpress.com (they host it for you) or some home-baked blog religion. In my 6 years of SEO consulting, step 1 is always to start or convert to a wordpress.org blog in order to get complete control of your search engine optimization features.

“You don’t buy a BMW automobile and then let the manufacturer choose what your radio plays, or how fast you drive. Don’t let the same thing happen to your blog!”

Hopefully you’re now running a self-hosted WordPress blog and are ready to optimize the heck out of it for Google. The biggest mistake photography bloggers make is to pick a standard theme, or even a premium theme, and assume that SEO is taken care of. I have yet to meet a designer who fully understands SEO – they are two different disciplines. So what happened is the theme designer set defaults at the theme level that either ignore or overwrite critical SEO features for your blog. For example meta descriptions, which display below your clickable link in search results, may not be coded into the theme and you would miss out on an opportunity to craft search-specific text just from picking a particular theme. Rest assured, there are plugins to help bridge the gap and bring other SEO benefits to your blog.

All in One SEO Pack

Despite what theme you chose the All in One SEO Pack provides overwrite control for your blog site, page, post, and category titles, descriptions, and keywords. Perfect because you don’t have to depend on the SEO expertise of the theme developer.

The title is one of the most important pieces of your page for search results. Each page/post should have a unique title that describes the page while using keywords you want to rank for. I strongly suggest removing your blog title from sub page and sub post titles so that the only item in the title is the headline of your page or post. Learn more about how I would setup the All in One SEO pack in this YouTube video.

Google XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps make Google’s job easier to find and index content on the web and potentially return it in search results. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress put your blog content into an XML code format Google can quickly and easily understand in addition to what it may see from the front end of your website (by reading the traditional text and links on your pages).

With sitemaps your blog posts typically appear more quickly in search results. After installing this plugin my posts appeared in Google within an hour of posting them (instead of a day)! You can see below it notifies all major search engines each time it updates. You can control the frequency and priority of information using this plugin and also what pages to restrict from search (like tag pages, archives, or private areas).

You can also submit the sitemap file to places like Google Webmaster Tools. The more search engines know about your blog, the more edge you have against your competitors.

Scribe

I’ve been using, and am an affiliate for, Scribe. I recommend it for all photographers. The WordPress plugin connects to a paid API service that can analyze your blog post for SEO efficiency. I click Analyze for this post to see my content score of 88% (I’m still writing…) and it shows me an analysis of my content and recommendations for items where I fall short.

There’s separate tabs for SEO Best Practices and also Keyword Analysis that breaks down all the keywords I used so I can see which phrase I’m most likely to rank for based on my usage (and change it accordingly if I was attempting something else). With Scribe you can maximize your chances of successfully ranking each blog post in search.

Lijit Search

Lijit Search offers better visibility to what users type into search engines to reach your website, then type into the search box within your blog once they are on your site. Knowing the keywords people use to find you and also what they are looking for within your site provides great insight to your audience. For SEO purposes you can create content that aligns with those phrases to reach more people. As an example, if users on my blog search for “key phrase X” then people in the Googleverse are probably searching for that too. So I should write a blog post about “key phrase X” and users on my site and out on Google will rejoice.

Lijit search can also return results from other website sources, for example when user search your website the results can show items from your social sites like YouTube, Twitter, or Digg for example. Nifty.

Thesis Theme

When you have an ebook and blog about SEO, you have to practice what you preach. I practice and am an affiliate for Thesis. I counted more than 10 Thesis features not available from my previous theme that are benefiting my site’s search results, and I flaunt them all with pride. No need for the All in One SEO Pack here, because this theme was developed specifically for search engines and has specific fields for SEO. For example you can have a custom title for your post (different than the post headline) as well as unique meta descriptions and keywords (hint: I never use keywords since search engines don’t either).

Of course there’s tons of options for customizing the SEO of the site as well. Here’s a few of them including homepage meta data.

Final Thoughts on Blog SEO

Blog SEO is worth the time or financial investment because the traffic payoff will be huge. When all of your posts start to rank for terms you never thought possible, you’ll quickly see increases of 10x or more. The holy grail is the Thesis Theme, but if you’re not into starting your whole blog over, then you might check out Photocrati’s photography themes (I’m a partner of theirs) then definitely go for the All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemap plugins today. Scribe is a worthy investment – I use it even as an expert in SEO. I would at least try it for a month to learn the best practices and/or to test the ROI for your particular blog. Lijit is the least important of the bunch, but I have found it valuable.

If you only have 5 minutes for your Blog SEO, focus on your homepage meta data. Your homepage is the most likely page to rank in search, so insure that the result is something users will click. The clickable link is your blog title, and should use the main phrase you want to rank for in search engines. The text underneath that link is the blog homepage meta description, or blog tagline. Although the words in this description will not help your rank position, it may entice users to click through to your website.

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