Your Blog Settings Are Probably Costing You Free Traffic

OK, so you have your blog set up and you are prepared to start reaping the rewards of your blog marketing. You already know you need to pick a subject, identify your keywords, write and post the blog, ping it to the social marketing and bookmarking sites and then send it to the people on your list. Then the search engines find your blog, move your site up in the rankings and you magically get gazillions of visitors to your site overnight. OK - it doesn't really happen that swiftly. But did you know your blog could have several settings that might actually be costing you traffic and rankings, which makes it much more difficult to get free visitors?

I am going to review a number of of the issues with the settings on your blog that you should adjust so you are getting the most benefit possible.

Settings For Your Permalinks

Nearly all blogs come with settings that use numbers for the end of the permalink. Example: yourdomain.com/?4567 Guess how valuable these kinds of numbers are to Google? They don't mean a thing. You want to alter this so that your keyword (that you know should be in your title) is the ending of your permalink. Your blog settings need to be updated so that the name of the post replaces the numbers. Be aware - if your blog is older you will have to install a plugin.. The John Goodley plugin Redirection can help with the transfer of your older permalinks to the new SEO friendly permalinks. When you view the permalink (that is now the post name) you should also make it more streamlined. Search engines prefer simple permalinks so you will want to take out all of the short, general words. You should end up with a short permalink, contains your keyword in it and makes sense if someone reads it.

Canonical URL

Did you know that search engines will sometimes view your site as 2 different websites? You can access websites on the internet two ways. The "www" can be included or skip it by including http://. Google assumes these two sites are different. I hope you already know this is not good. Doesn't it make sense to have each of your links, visitors, etc to be seen on just one website instead of splitting between "two"? Obviously it's awfully crucial that this gets rectified. Using Google Webmaster is one option. You just tell them whether you want to use the www or not. Another option you can use is to use a plugin to make everything point to one site The Redirection plugin from above will do this.

Do You Have Hidden Duplicate Content?
The majority of blogs are set up based on the theory that you want visitors to locate posts on your website as many ways as possible. Readers love this - search engines hate it. In addition to the post title, blogs also usually access content by date, author, tag and category. Search engines will very likely consider it as duplicated content. They really, really don't like this. In order to keep these search options available to your readers, you need to update your blog settings. You need to tell the search engines that they should not index the "duplicate" pages. The Install Robots Meta (by Joost DeValk) will do allow you to do this if your blog theme won't let you.

These are just a few of your settings you will want to check when your blog is set up. There are more that I don't have the space to write about. Keep looking for more of them. Find them, fix them, and get more out of your blog marketing... automatically.

By: Gail Ramberg

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Gail Ramberg spent the last few years researching the best ways to market a business online. She has more information on how to set up a blog available. Find out how to get your own MLM lead program