Blog updates and a few quick SEO tips
No groundbreaking post today, just announcing that I’ve made a couple of small changes to the blog’s setup which will hopefully help me improve the amount of traffic I receive from search engines. While I already receive a fair share of traffic, especially from Google, I don’t see any harm in making the blog a little friendlier for the spiders. Of course, as the friendly guy I am, I will be sharing these small tips with my loyal readers!
The first thing I did was setup a redirect from all URLs without the trailing slash (”http://lars-christian.com/catx/posty” now redirects to “http://lars-christian.com/catx/posty/”). This is because internally I use all URLs with the trailing slash, and now if someone links to the URL without it, the blog will serve a 301-redirect to the URL with the trailing slash. This makes sure that any potential link juice won’t be spread over two different pages.
If you want to do this for your own blog or site, you can simply add this to your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^\.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]
Next I added a nifty little plugin called Head META Description. This is handy because it automatically changes the META Description tags on all the pages based on the content of that page. WordPress by default uses the description of your blog as a description on all pages, and I believe this will help increase clickthrough-rates from the search engines, in particular Google which uses the META tag for its description of your search listings.
Another thing I did was to make it so that my archives don’t display full posts, but instead only excerpts with a link to the full post. This is not only much more practical, but it also avoids potential duplicate content penalties from search engines. You can find out just how to do it over at Daily Blog Tips.
The final thing I did was also something I picked up from Daily Blog Tips, namely modifying / optimizing the title tag. Check out that article as well. I had previously been using an “optimized” title tag, but it was a bit funky because the archives page just got the title from the most recent post in that category or month.
I also played a bit around with the header of the theme (the menu). It looks a bit funky now, but it still works. I think I’ll have to get around to completely redoing the top, because in all honesty it doesn’t look very good as it stands now.
Well that’s it for this little tip-filled post. In the coming days I’ll be transferring my blog to a new host, so now you know why if you can’t reach it in the near future. These days host-switching doesn’t involve much downtime though, especially concerned to five years ago. I’ll also be documenting the steps I take, and write a step-by-step guide to how to transfer your blog to a new host. It’s really easy, and I believe quite a few make it much harder than it has to be, so be sure to stay tuned for that.