It is important to know how to effectively implement search engine optimization techniques for your blog. Many people have written about this issue in the past, so instead of reiterating everything they have already discussed, I thought I’d just point you in the right direction.

My personal favorite blog CMS is Wordpress because of the availability of support for the software as well as the abundance of plugins. For this reason, many of the following SEO optimization techniques will be unique to Wordpress.

After installing a fresh copy of Wordpress, the first thing I normally do is change my permalink structure. You can do this by going to Options > Permalinks in the Wordpress admin panel and changing to a custom permalink structure. The permalink structure I prefer for SEO purposes is %category%/%postname%. If you already have an established blog, you can use the permalinks migration plugin to change your existing links to your new permalink structure.

Next, I typically like to edit the title tag code in the header.php file of whatever template I’m using so that the title of the post is inserted in the title tags rather than the name of the blog. This can be done by replacing the code in between the <title> tags with:

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(’name’); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ” - “; bloginfo(’name’); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo(’name’); echo ” search results: “; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title(”,true); } ?> </title>

Thanks to the Wickedfire forum for this tip. As an alternative, you can also use the SEO title tag plugin which serves a similar purpose.

Once I’ve done these two things I go ahead and install some handy SEO and link building plugins. My personal favorites are:

Sociable - The Sociable wordpress plugin will add social bookmarking icons to the bottom of your posts so your readers can easily bookmark and share posts on sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl and others. There are several alternatives to Sociable such as this social bookmarking plugin.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - This is a nifty plugin that generates a complete sitemap of your whole site making every one of your posts easily accessible. Some features of the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and many other options.

Google Sitemap Generator - The Google Sitemap Generator creates and exports an XML sitemap of your blog that is compliant with the Google webmaster’s sitemap tool. This saves you the hassle of manually generating your own. Time is money! This will allow the search engine spiders to easily crawl and index your site.

Head Meta - The Head Meta plugin will dynamically add meta tags to the meta description of your header on the fly by extracting keywords from the first few lines of your posts. Sweet.

If you successfully implement what I’ve outlined, you’re very close to having a completely optimized blog. Keep in mind that there is no one definitive way to go about completely SEOing a blog so keep tweaking, playing and monitoring the results. Here are a few other websites that discuss the search engine optimization of Wordpress blogs:

Wordpress Plugins Needed to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines

Wordpress and SEO

Wordpress SEO: First Steps