If..Else Log

A little bit of SEO

Whilst I wouldn't say I am the most active seeker of traffic, I have to confess that there is a certain pleasure in seeing traffic flow in. Hence, when a thread on unusual search phrases popped up on the 9rules forum, it brought to mind the topic of Search Engine Optimisation.

Fellow 9ruler Neil Patel, who did some SEO work for me recently, has a number of posts covering the subject 1 but as he'll point out, many of important things you could do to your site to aid SERP ranking are also sensible and common-sense.

Using semantic markup, dynamic meta tags, usable title names, pretty permalinks, alt and title tags; as well as aiding SE discoverability, it's comforting to observe that, just as importantly, they all have the side effect of improving usability2.

There are downsides to SEO however. Finding out your highest commented posts aren't your more serious pieces but are instead less important pieces such as this one on MGS 4 and Yahoo Passwords can be a bit deflating3.


  1. Worth subscribing to if you're interested in SEO or online marketing [back]
  2. Or is that backwards? Is SEO a side-effect of optimising and improving usability for users? [back]
  3. Though, I'll admit, that MGS comment thread kept me hooked for ages. [back]

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One Response to “A little bit of SEO”

  1. Gravatar Skylar November 29th, 2006 12:50 pm

    Is there any special techniques that can be used to optimize a wordpress blog on my server for SEO. One issue I see is no way to change the title tags on each page, where it seems to take the blog name for the home page.
    I have several hundred 600+ inbound links.
    I have pinged Technorati manually and used pingoat as well as pingomatic every time I add a new blog.
    There is plenty of content, about 30 articles.
    What else can I do? What else should I do to optimize my blog?