First post! Not much exists in the way of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with a baseball blog or site. Most sites are geared towards tech/business, etc. As a baseball site owners we have different priorities and options.
As my sidebar states, my home base is mopupduty.com, which I’ve been writing at for about a year and a half. Through that time we’ve used some SEO techiques in an attempt to grow the blog. We’ve done a half decent job and I’ll share some of the little tricks we’ve learned. But there’s always room for improvement, so hopefully all of us can share information and increase the traffic to all of our site.
This Site:
To begin the begin I went over to wordpress.com to give their free blog a try. I figured it may be good to get some exposure through their internal tagging method. This idea feel flat on its face once I signed up and broswer the admin panel. It turns out that wordpress.com won’t let you edit the templates, upload plugins and other necessary tactics. So that’s out (although I’ll return later for a link or two).
Moved over to blogger.com. Its a little better on the SEO side but the plugins aren’t as flexible as a hosted wordpress blog.
Typepad costs more than self hosting (when one already has a server package), so that’s out as well.
In the end I ended up registering the site your currently at, baseballseo.com. I really can’t argue with a self hosted application, as I have the freedom to SEO in any fashion I see fit.
Basic SEO additions:
After tinkering around with a few templates I went ahead and added some of the typical “starter” SEO tactics:
Edited the Header to include a number of keywords (option menu)
Changed the permalinks from the ?p=X to name based. This just adds an extra keyword for the engines. (option menu)
Divided up the two sidebars: I made the far right sidebar for the website internals and I’ll keep the close left boxes for external links, ads, etc.
Added a contact page: This is for the engines, put together quickly with some simple info. In the same vein, I added the keywords baseball seo to the titles and URL’s. This is much better than a plain “about” title.
Signed up for:
Bar none the best free traffic/page count platform available.
Since its been purchased by Google the service has improved, with past fee services now becoming free to all.
Signed up and claimed my blog.
That’s about it for the very basic stuff. Next time around we’ll get a little more into some of the posting techniques and more start-up tricks.
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SEO, Baseball, Adsense, Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Feedburner, Google
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