“This is only a hunch I have, but I think pages located closer to the main folder do better in the search engines.”

This is true, more or less. Keep the number of subcategories down in order to keep the URL short. Google seems to prefer shorter URLs, so iron out all the irrelevant junk. If I were you I would change the way the blog generates titles – getting rid of the /2009/05/20. /blog/yourposthere is sufficient and your visitors won’t know the difference.

Make sure you have your blog configured so in the title of the website, the title of the blogpost comes first, and then the name of the blog. I’d recommend leaving the slogan out because in SEO land, the title has an overall value and the addition of words diluted the power of each one. (ie. Less=More). But that’s a personal choice and the argument goes both ways.

With images the ALT tag is very important… but only if you want people to come to your site from images.google.com. You’ll have to be prepared for people to copy your image source HTML and use your image on their site, at your hosting expense.

The Description Tag is important for actually getting people to click on to your site once it’s on the search results. See if you can start your description tag with “How to” – it will help you focus the Tag on the needs of the visitor.

Title does matter, you need to do your best with it to make the title is something someone would search for in a search engine.

For example, training dogs. Most people’s title would be

“How To Train Your Dog”(search volume in Google 12,100 per month)

But a better title would be:

“How To Train A Dog” (search volume 27,100).

Incredibly using the Google keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) it turns out “How To Train Dog” gets 49,500 searches. I wouldn’t advocate butchering grammar just for Google, but an easy rule to follow is to not use personal pronouns (you, my, your, etc).

Put your prospective page or blog title into that tool and Google will come up with a list of similar search terms and how many people are searching them.

For Wordpress owners I believe these three things are the most important:

- Making the title something someone would search for
- Making sure the URL corresponds with the title
- Getting links with rich anchor text.

Hope that helps the readership.

Matt.

Thank you for the post! As someone who is currently starting out with a new blog the concept of SEO can definitely be overwhelming, so having some basic pointers is definitely beneficial.

Sean