I've had a few people tell me that when setting up a website vs a blog - they get more hits from a blog. I'm wondering if this is due to content being updated regularly or SEO (athough the two go hand in hand). I just set up a blog using wordpress and i got indexed within a day and have a few pages on google already but when it comes to SEO and blogs, i don't have a clue. Theres the title - thats pretty self explanatory, but what about meta tags? robot.txt and sitemaps....maybe these are all in the admin options at my wordpress but how does one go about optimizing a blog for the search engines?? Is it harder to do that the average website?
are these plugins available on the admin section? Do people prefer them than writing out the meta tags yourself?
Yes, you can look for some of the plug-ins and use them. The title and description are the main meta's that should be done.
Basic tips for a blog - find a domain name with keywords that are commonly searched but have low competition, it will get you to the top extremely fast. - target keywords in your title tag, and make sure that keyword is in 3% - 7% of your blog article/post - label your blog posts using keywords. alt-tags also must have keywords - make sure your homepage doesn't show full blog posts...you have to use the "more" when posting blogs on your homepage to avoid duplicate content. - Find every single SEO plug-in you can find. There are literally hundreds of plugins, so go & find them. - put robot.txt thingies for your archives and dates to avoid duplicate content - in order to get wordpress sitemaps, you have to host your own blog. I recommend Hostgator. Blogs are better because they update extremely easy, they're fun/easy to navigate, and everything is pretty much organized for you.