Improve Your Blog’s SEO in 5 Minutes

My friend Aidan (mappingtheweb.com) and I were talking about Search Engine Optimization this weekend, and he pointed me to some resources that would improve my blog’s Google rankings. I’m always one for a quick fix, so here are some quick and easy ways that, in 5 minutes or less, will improve your blog’s SEO.

1. The Head Meta Description is often overlooked on Wordpress blogs, even though Google really likes it when each page has a different description. How can you remedy this? Download this plugin. It automatically takes the first 25 words of your post and creates a meta description with it.
2. Neil Patel suggests using only your post’s heading as a title for your blog entry. His fix? On wordpress, go into your header file and make the following modification:
   <title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name'); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?> </title>
3. Use a Related Posts plugin. Not only will this showcase some of your other great content to your readers, but search engine crawlers will be exposed to more links! Always a plus.

If you have more than 5 minutes, consider reading these articles.

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
Optimizing your blog for search engines