• Graywolf's SEO Blog, Friday, January 11, 2008 3:45 PM

WordPress may be one of the most popular blog platforms, but the content management system (CMS) doesn't automatically tweak things like post titles, filenames or slugs for maximum search exposure. So Michael Gray offers a step-by-step rundown of how to optimize WordPress blog entries for search, using a post about teen celeb Jamie Lynn Spears being pregnant as the example.

By default, WordPress would craft the same sentence for the page title, post title and page slug: "Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant." Gray suggests making minor changes that would correspond to the way people would search for such juicy gossip, using keywords like "baby bump" and "Britney Spears" to gain more exposure. Thus, the post title would be expanded to "Britney Spears16 Year Old Sister Jamie Lynn Has a Baby Bump."

Gray shows that while the nuts and bolts of title tags, meta data and keyword research are crucial for blog SEO, using knowledge of trends in your niche (i.e. knowing that the term "baby bump" is synonymous with pregnancy in gossip rags) should be part of the search strategy as well.

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