I want to share my experience about blog and search engine optimization (SEO). There are some concepts to understand before starting a blog because they can impact seriously the architecture of your website. If you have to think about SEO after your blog is already published with many contents, the optimizations required could force you to change the content and the URL of your pages. So you should have some knowledge as soon as possible.

I won’t give some deep details or technical stuff because SEO is a real job which need some theory and a lot of experiences. You will find below the concepts you should know.

Search engines don’t index site but pages. It sounds trivial but it’s very important. It means having a strategy just at the beginning (like submit a sitemap, check pages titles format, or optimize header of the pages) is not enough. If SEO is important for your site, you have to think about it each time you add a new content.

As said before, the most important SEO parameter is the content of the site. It’s your major asset to have a good ranking in search engine results. I give bellow some SEO experts tricks:

• Permalink structure have to be like ”/%postnames%/” or  ”/%category%/%postnames%/“. Others formats are useless since they don’t add any information and they make your URL longer.
• The slug (URL variable part) have to be not too long and avoid stop words (a, one, for, with etc.)
• The main keywords of your page have to be in the URL, in the title and in the first lines of the post.
• The first words of your post will be used by search engines in the result pages. Your first words should make reader visit your website. You can specify the text to use by search engine by adding a meta tag (see plugin below)

A good way to optimize your ranking is to have a thematic page with links to your most interesting or popular pages. This type of page should have a good ranking in the search engines results.

Avoid duplicated content. It is possible that your content is accessible thru different URL or some pages of your website have the same couple title/description. Search engines don’t like it. The main cause for blog is archives. With WordPress for example there are time, categories, tags and authors archives. The risk that the content of the blog is duplicated is very high. There are solutions: meta tag can help you. I let you search the web to have more information on this subject.

The site speed is important for visitors pleasure and for search engines ranking. Two ways to improve your site speed:

•  Use plugins as little as possible. Of course they can help you much but they can slow your site. Many plugins can be replaced by theme modifications. Now child themes make this update really easy.
• Use a cache plugin. There are many of them. Search on internet to find the one corresponding to your needs.

There are many SEO plugins for WordPress to help you rank your pages in search engines results. For me, WordPres SEO by Yoast is one of the best because it adds a checklist in pages and posts edit view to help you optimize your content for ranking.

The last advice I can give is to read regularly about SEO on internet. Search engines update their algorithm regularly and you have to understand and react to keep a good ranking.

Non-exhaustive reading list accessible for newbies:

• Seomix and Le blog de Florian Karmen (French speaking)
• Yoast and Matt Cutts blog (English speaking)

I hope this initiation will be helpful for beginners. Others reader you can correct or add advises in the comments.

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