I must confess that I thought SEO, search engine optimization, was something consultants sold to the big guys and not for small blogs like mine.
More for the sake of it I did install the All in One SEO Pack in WordPress, put in on automatic (the plugin autocreates SEO keywords and excerpt) and forgot about it.
A while back I installed the StatPress plugin in my blogs. This is an excellent plugin that shows an overview with number of visitors, pageviews, spiders and feeds. More interesting though is the details shown about last hits, last search terms, last referrers and last pages shown. Suddenly I had a simple yet effective instrument inside my blog that showed me what brought people to my blogs.
I started to look at the search terms used by people coming to my blogs. And to my surprise my posts, for some of those search terms, could be found on the first page of search results. For instance some of my book reviews turned up among the links to Amazon and other giants. This made me realize that SEO works for the small sites too and that the All in One SEO Pack even on autopilot can improve your visibility a lot.
As a result of this research in Statpress information I am now using the All in One SEO Pack more actively. When creating a new post or page I enter keywords that I think are relevant. I have also decided to use the SEO thinking already from the beginning for my new sites, Key Coaching and CoachGuiden (in Swedish only), in order to market myself and my services.
An example of visibility, my post about Starbucks and The Ultimate Customer Voice Survey is shown above the links to Starbucks when searching at Yahoo for starbucks customer voice survey.
See also WordPress and SEO.
Update June 21, 2008
Chris Garrett has posted about Blog SEO: Boost Your Search Rankings With Internal Links.
Update July 7, 2008
Do set the options in Statpress since it gathers a lot of data. I no longer collect information about spider visits and only save the information for one month.
Update July 10, 2008.
ProBlogger has a post about How to Grow Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog.
Note: Photo by dbking.