However, as much as we do SEO, it is also important to know that eventually the real readers you are targeting for are the human readers – so write for humans first before you optimize for search engines.

The search engines’ job is to give the best and most relevant results for human searches, so its logical to think that the best article for humans in that topic would (in the ideal SE world) rank the best in the SERPs.

With the existing Serendipity software Im sort of limited as to the placement of graphics or changing the H1 and H2 areas. But I am working on learning how to edit and customize the templates used for the package. The basic package is very plain jane vanilla. I have had to really push the limits of what the plugins will do to get what I have so far. But I will keep working on it. I should have used WordPress rather than Serendipity I know but the admin controls for Serendipity were very similar to another program Im familiar with and workign with it came very easily as compared to WordPress which was almost painful for me.

The point about “branding” as to the blogs name is exactly right. Its easy to remember and almost impossible to mis spell. I saw a video site some time ago called “that video site’ and never had any problem remembering it. I also own the domain name ‘thatpoliticalsite” for a possible larger portal style site i plan on down the road. I just checked and “thatpoliticalforum” just expired and I am going to snag it tonight just in case for a political forum.

I recently did a piece about a specific item in the news and my traffic literally increased 1000% for about 3 days as the article headline was a very popular Google search on events in Iraq. So Ive started watching sites that list the most popular searches and work that into my article headlines. Now after a couple of weeks the traffic has died down but is still a bit more than twice what it was before the surge and I think a lot of its due to careful choice of article headlines. I think playing the search engines this way is a valid tactic as long as its not just making up nonsense articles to lure people there. My Sitemeter account lists all the search strings people used to get to me so i figure why not use it?

Before starting this blog I was an administrator at a political discussion forum and learned a lot on how to keep people interested and wanting to come back. The way I see it theres three things I need to do to keep them coming back 1) fresh interesting content 2) New features in the sense of things the site will do for them (I constantly tweak my sites appearance and functionality) and 3) Bright shiny objects. I figure the most inportant thing is to get peoples attention and then convince them to keep coming back.

I know it is going to take time to establish a good depth of content and a solid readership. I figured at least two years to get things going well. It would be nice if eventually I can make some $$$ from it but even if I dont thats ok as I love writing.

I will keep coming back and reading, thanks again for all the good info.

~RJH

However, in this case, it does not really matter whether you use “ThatPoliticalBlog” or “That Political Blog”.

First, “That” is ignored by the search blog.

Second, political and blog are two very common words – too general to optimize for. In my opinion, even “political blog” is too general and you can do a bit more research to get a more specific area of politics to target and optimize for.

Thirdly, I guess “ThatPoliticalBlog” is more for branding than search optimization and it is a good brandable domain name – I like it.

As far as SEO is concerned, it is a good suggestion to convert ThatPoliticalBlog to a graphic and use the H1 tag for the title of each post instead, to fully take advantage of the Title.

This may be trivial to some people, but it is the small things that the search engines look for when it comes to decide which web page should be on top and which goes below.

Its great that you harness the use of plugins for your site – they make the workload a lot easier sometimes, but do also take note that not all plug-ins fix problems, some create more problems.

Personally I don’t like snap preview plugin – especially if the link is an internal link. For example, if you hover over you nav bar, there is practically no use of the plugin because every link looks the same!

If you wish to further tweak the site’s code, I would recommend that you make the current H1 “ThePoliticalBlog” into a a graphic (which you already have in the middle), and change the current H2 headers into H1, and that is where you major keywords would go.

The reason for this is that is that “ThePoliticalBlog” will probably not do as well in search engines as “The Political Blog” (with spaces). If you visit http://www.blogopreneur.com, you will see that it is what I do also – “Blogopreneur” makes no sense to Google, so I used “Blog Marketing Singapore” instead. “Blogopreneur” is a brand name, and “Blog Marketing” is what I do.

I’ve not read any literature or referenced anywhere that says about connected words in the text, but this is my best guess. Hope that helps.

Great post.

Really appreciate your thoughts! Thanks!

Meta tags are no longer as important as they once were as few search engines pay attention to them. Your blogroll plays little impact on your search engine optimization, and archives aren’t helpful either, as you described them. What is helpful about archives is not about specific archives but how your site’s navigation helps search engines find all the intra-connecting links between your posts so they can crawl your entire site not just a few pages.

Search engines don’t always enter through the front page, so the issue of the power of your front page for search engines isn’t as important as your overall navigational links found on every page which leads to another page and another and so on. A good site map, category and tag lists, and other navigational aids help the crawler move through the site, as does a good XML Sitemap hidden in your host server files for search engines to read like an index to your site.

The key to good search engine optimization is designing the underlying code of your web pages to permit search engines to get to the information they need to catalog in their database without hindrance. Let nothing get in the way of you and the search engine web crawler.

You can learn more about making your WordPress blog SEO friendly in Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Guide.