WordPress has become the de facto blogging platform: particularly for blogs that are to be self-hosted. On first installation, however, it’s like a blob of plasticine – formless and blank, waiting to be morphed into, er, Morph. Design is part of this, of course, and Wordpress benefits from tens of thousands of themes, most available for free which can then be customised by those to whom CSS manipulation is not a dark art.

However, if you are creating a blog as a traffic generator for your business or as a business itself, your time should be spent on attracting and engaging with your target audience rather than heavily editing the look and feel. You’ll find below ten tips for getting your blog noticed. It goes without saying (surely) that your blog posts must  be interesting, relevant, written by you (not harvested from an articles site) and targeted at your intended audience – no plugin or technique can rescue the terminally uninteresting from obscurity.

1: Thesis

Thesis is a WordPress theme aimed at making it easy for a non-techie to edit the look the feel whilst also adding excellent Search Engine Optimisation features to WordPress. Now, I actually am a techie but I find Thesis a huge timesaver compared to my previous technique of taking a theme and customising it by hand. Thesis includes options within its WordPress control panel to control colours, fonts and layout along with SEO customisation built into the Edit Post page.

Thesis is the only one of these 10 tips that costs – in this case around £55 or £105 for unlimited sites – but it’s repaid that cost to me many, many times over in time saved and I’m only on my second Thesis-based site.

Example sites include: Breadtopia, Almost Frugal, Green Your Decor, and one of my sites Scribbleit.

2: Each post should be focused on a single topic

Search engines prize relevance and one of the ways they judge this is by looking at how tightly focused a page is: if the whole page is about a single topic then that will be seen as more relevant if a user types a similar keyphrase into their search engine.

3: Add a custom title if necessary

The Title attribute is used by the search engines to head up your entry in the search results. By making sure it contains your keywords and keyphrases it will be seen as more relevant, will appear higher up the results and will be more likely to be clicked on. Of course, you can achieve a similar result by simply getting your post title right in the first place!

4: Always add a custom description

The Description meta tag is used by Google and other search engines as the text that appears beneath the title in the organic results. By modifying this so that it includes the keywords you will, again, boost your ranking and make it more likely that a searcher seeing your listing will click on it.

5: Subscribe to Comments

The Subscribe to Comments plugin adds a checkbox to the comments area beneath each post. If the commenter checks the box then any further comments will be sent to them via email. The result of this is more traffic because commenters return to see what others have said – it also keeps a discussion going for longer and creates a forum-like interaction thread.
The Thesis theme includes custom fields in the Edit Post screen to allow you to set these and other SEO related properties in one go. If you don’t use Thesis you can achieve a similar effect with All in One SEO Pack which is a free WordPress plugin.

6: Sociable

The Sociable plugin add adds icons beneath each post inviting the user to submit a link to the article to their favourite social network. This, of course, results in a link-back to your site which boosts search engine rankings.
Completely configurable, you can set this up to only include networks that make sense and, indeed, you should delete any you don’t see as relevant to avoid making it difficult for your visitor to find their network’s icon.

7: Google XML Sitemaps

Having a Google sitemap makes your site easier to index but generating one is not a trivial task on a blog with lots of posts. This plugin automates the process but, to make it work, you need to have FTP access to your server. Once done, create an account with Google’s Webmaster Tools and upload the sitemap.

8: Permalinks

Blog entries are, by default, indexed in numerical order. By implementing Permalinks you aren’t changing this but you are allowing these numerical page names to be represented by a more logical, customisable, structure. In most cases this amounts to the post title being included in the URL (as in the case of this post). As with setting the Title and Description, including readable names makes it more likely you will rank well (as long as you choose sensible names for your posts). Permalink settings are accessed from the WordPress control panel under Settings. My favourite structure is /%year%/%category%/%postname%/

Setting up Permalinks does involve creating or changing your .htaccess file – if you don’t know what one of these is or you’re not sure if you already have one I suggest getting some who knows what they’re doing to sort it out. It is well worth the effort in the long run.

9: Google Analytics

Information is power and Google Analytics is the easiest way to find out which of your posts are most popular and provides a whole host of data about your visitors. This informatino allows you to focus your posts on those topics that pull in visitors. Thesis has an option within its control panel for adding the necessary Javascript but, if you’re using a different theme, there are a number of Analytics related plugins you can use to achieve the same thing.

10: Get out there, get active

Becoming active within your chosen community has three benefits. Firstly, by answering questions on forums and commenting on the blog posts of other people, you are generating backlinks to your blog (assuming you include such links in your signature). Secondly, you are establishing yourself as an expert in your field and thirdly, you’re learning about your community.
And a final tip, linked to this, if you’re at a loss about what to topic to pick for your next blog posting simply go along to a well populated forum serving your target audience and sort the forum posts by number of views (taking into account that older posts will tend to have more views). If you find a post that’s been around for a while, has had lots of views and comments and is still generating interest, write a blog entry answering that issue and you’ll be on to a winner.

Make sure you bring something new to the discussion and don’t rip off the ideas of others: thoughts that come from your head are going to be more authentic and web users are becoming better attuned to the whiff of the barnyard.