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.

As search, SEO, and the WordPress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices.

As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot.

I will learn from the article in order to make my own WordPress-based sites, Key Coaching and CoachGuiden (in Swedish), and my blogs easier to find in search engines.

DailyBlogTips posts about Take Screenshots with Firefox 2.0. That is how I found out about Screengrab!.

Put Things Off posts about The Creative Sweet: Creativity Should Be Free, listing lots of free software.

Brent Hodgson posts The Story of the Three Little Internet Marketers which is about SEO. Talking about SEO, Anywired has a post about 7 Signs of SEO Scams.

David Airey lists 13 of the best WordPress plugins. I use about half of them.

Hack WordPress posts the 50 Best Free WordPress Themes Gallery.

Another post at Problogger is about How to Herd Organic Search Traffic to Your Blog, it is a long but great article about SEO (Search engine optimization). A related post is 10 Important Facts of Blog Promotion over at DailyBlogTips.

DailyWritingTips has an interesting post about Break Writer’s Block: Don’t Begin at the Beginning, skip linear thinking and start writing wherever you can.

Problogger has an great post about Blogging Fatigue – 8 Tips to Get Over Your Blogging Blues. It starts like this:

Blogging is often more of a lifestyle choice than a hobby or a business model, and that choice often has its cost. Time spent writing content is the easy part – the total time and energy commitment for researching, tweaking, ferreting out new stories, obsessively checking stats and participating actively in the blogosphere is too often all consuming.

Chris Garrett writes about How to Get More Bookmarks and Better Links. He writes:

The sorts of articles that get bookmarked get more links. They are exactly the sorts of articles that will get maximum referrals from other bloggers because they know their readers will want to know about them too. This builds links, search engine traffic and increased positive brand awareness.

North x East has a guest post by Skellie about Six Simple Things You Can Do To Enjoy Blogging More. The introduction says:

Whether your blogging goals are to make money online or become the most popular blog in your niche, there’s one goal bloggers don’t talk about enough: to enjoy what is, first and foremost, a hobby and an intellectual pursuit.

The Blog Herald has a post about The Art of the Weekend Blogger. It is about writing in the weekend and then publishing during the week. I plan to go in this direction, writing ahead will give me a more steady flow of posts at my blogs.

Daily Blog Tips also writes about Measuring Sticks for Blogs: Do They Matter? that looks at some of the most common methods that are used for measuring the success of a blog.

Dan Sweet gives advice that you are NOT supposed to follow in his post titled How To Tank an Interview in 17 Easy Steps.

Skellie has posted about The Blogger’s Library: 28 Free eBooks and Excerpts for Bloggers.

The tips are divided into these five categories:

• WordPress Setup
• Themes & Design
• Check & Validate
• Plugins
• SEO & Analytics