In 8 First Step SEO Tips for Bloggers answers this question:
What are the first steps to optimizing my blog for searches?
Darren expands on his eight tips, in short they are:
1. Content is King
2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For
3. Titles Titles Titles
4. Keywords in other parts of your post
5. Link to Your Own Posts
6. Links from Outside Your Blog
7. Plugins
8. Readers Begat Readers
For help with item 2, what people search for, I use a plugin called WordPress.com Stats. It gives me the statistics I need and is easier on your blog than Google Analytics.
Under item 7 (plugins) Darren links to an older post, 9 SEO Plugins Every Wordpress Blog Should Have, but the plugins I checked were not updated for WordPress 2.8.
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Men With Pens has a great post about WordPress 2.8: It’s Time to Upgrade Your Site. They describe what’s new and also reminds us to deactivate plugins before an upgrade.
I was in a rush when upgrading one of my blogs and did a ‘deep end of the pool’ upgrade, upgrading WordPress without deactivating my plugins. The result was that all the site showed was an empty page. It turned out that one of my plugins (Redirection) was outdated and did not work in 2.8. Removing that plugin folder gave me back a working blog.
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I am testing the Simple Tags plugin for WordPress. What I want is a plugin that makes it easy to tag posts. Simple Tags has a lot of other features too, like related posts and related tags, that I don’t need.
I used the ClickTags-plugin before but it seems to have vanished from the market. The last version of the plugin that I have does not work with WordPress 2.8.
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I found Wordle through Lifehacker.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
It’s an interesting tool that I will test, could be fun to do for blog posts.
Facebook has finally realized that so called vanity links are better than their old version.
My old Facebook link is
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=633735409
My new vanity style link which makes more sense is
http://www.facebook.com/bengt.wendel
To create your vanity link just log in to your Facebook account and then go to Facebook username.
Read more:
Facebook Username Rush Imminent: What YOU Need to Know at Mashable
I have upgraded to the latest version (0.26.2) of 