SEMbyDesign

This is an excerpt of an email I sent to a friend about SEO on their Wordpress site. They had the XML Sitemap Generator installed, and the All In One SEO pack, so the assumption is that you start with this.

1. Make sure you go to Google Webmaster tools and acutally submit the Site Map. I can expand on this if you need me to, it will require a small amount of technical knowledge to complete it.
2. Make sure you fill out the All In One SEO pack info by: 1. Setting the default Title, keywords and Description for the home page – you should do some key word research to find out what people of this demographic are searching for on the theme of your site, ie. if the key phrase is “Christian Child Rearing” you should be including that phrase in your posts on a regular basis. For the Title, use only 90 characters, For the description, use only 160 characters, for the Key Words, use only 6 to 10 of the most important ones, nothing extraneous, the second part of this is, for each post, do the same thing, by clicking on “All In One SEO Pack” at the bottom of the post page, and fill in the information using key words specific to your post.
3. Make the title of your post contain key words, and repeat them in your post.

That’s the “On-site” optimization.

Off-site:
Submit your RSS feed to FeedAg.com and other RSS feed aggregators – if you google you will see many of these.
also, you can use a service called Pingoat.com – do it after each blog post.
Join Technorati and BlogCatalog – these are pretty good ones.
Send your feed to your Facebook profile – each new post gets put up for all your friends to read.
Leave Comments on other people’s blogs with a link to your own within the key words that you are trying to optimize for – ie if you were trying to optimize for “baby devotions” you would link the words “baby devotions” by using <a href=”http://www.excellentbabyblog.com”>baby devotions</a> – Do this as often as possible – it really does work.

That’s the quick rundown – it’s not easy, and I don’t know what kind of traffic you are getting now, but if you do all that you should see an increase. Also, consistency in your blog will get you a following, especially if it is a niche topic – lot’s of times a broad topic will not attract loyal followers – try picking 6 topics, rotate between them – if you post 3 times a week you will write about each topic 2 times in a month – continue with the same 6 topics (which – if researched to find out what people are searching for-say “baby strollers”) you will start to see the site come to the top for those specific topics, rather than if you only write one post every 6 months on any given topic. Keep in mind that “Content is King” in the internet world and it does mostly come to that. Frequent updates (3 times a week is good) and 300 words or so per post are good.