This is a brief summary of all previous articles devoted to the subject of SEO for blogs. It will help you to do a quick check of your blog’s structural design.

URLs

If your blogging software allows creating meaningful URLs with friendly wording rather than just posts’ IDs, set it up right after the installation. It will provide additional description for your posts for people that find links to your posts on the internet. It will also serve as a hint for search engine crawlers that will try to figure out what keywords/keyphrases your content should be indexed for. For more information about friendly URLs check out Keywords in URLs, Underscores vs. Dashes.

Page Titles

Page titles that appear in the browsers’ top bar or on the page tabs (in case of a browser with multiple page tabs) will also appear in the list of search results. These titles have to be short and descriptive. It will help people looking for particular information to notice and understand what this page is about as they scan search results served by the search engines. It is recommended that they also contain keywords that are relative to the content presented on the pages.

If the template for your blog includes the name of the blog (Example: MyBlog >> Post Name), make sure that your posts’ names come before the blog’s name (Example: Post Name – MyBlog). If branding your posts with blog’s name inclusion is not important to you, omitting the blog’s name is recommended.

Meta Information

Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords derive their roots from the times of “friendly” Internet and seem to be holding strong up to this time in spite of the official and not so official statements that Meta tags are, in most cases, ignored by the major SEs. If your blogging software allows you to have custom Meta tags, then pay more attention to writing meaningful description rather than working on lengthy lists of keywords. As there is no proof that they will ever be used by search engines. However, one will notice that Meta descriptions are actually used for building page snippets (short page descriptions in search results).

Headers Tags

Use header tags wisely! Make sure that your templates do not use <H1> tags for just emphasizing the name of the blog in the header section of all of your pages. It is a waste of their potentials. Read more about the use of header tags in templates How to Pick SEO Template for Your Blog.

Navigation – beware duplicate content

Easy navigation is the key to your visitors’ satisfaction! But make sure you understand the problems with duplicate content that can arise from having links to archives and category pages. Same posts that show up on the home page, a category page and an archive page may be treated as duplicate content and dilute the importance of the original post itself. Using just excerpts from your posts on the home page can, somewhat, help the situation. In case of WordPress there are a few plugins that will help you deal with the standard navigation menus by inserting rel=”nofollow” directives where needed to prevent crawlers from following links to the pages with the duplicate content.

Internal Linking

This part is a recommendation rather than a SEO checklist point. Make sure that you link your related posts with each other. Use necessary keywords as anchor text for your references and grow internal linkways (link highways) within your site. It is another chance for your pages/posts to claim the right set of keywords by which they will be indexed, as well as their importance on the global picture of the whole site. And of course it will help your readers conveniently navigate through your content by researching related topics.

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