This is where it gets interesting. If you’re in the process of building your first site, you might want to note some of these down.

Search engine positioning includes both technical and non-technical aspects. The non-technical aspects fit squarely in the Content Strategy I’ve been talking about, and I’ll discuss them in detail in a later post. This post is about the technical things.

You can do the same with most websites, except for the free sites built on the back end of another organisation’s URL. I’ve set up a few websites using Drupal in the past, and you can certainly do it there. WordPress (yes, this is a WordPress site) makes many of them easy.

Most of the things I did were set and forget things that needed to be done only once. Such as:

1. I chose a blog theme that specifically mentioned it was optimised for SEO. Now, I don’t have the detailed technical knowledge to be able to see if they’re right, so I had to take their word for it. It’s also clean and, to my eyes, looks very good – so that’s an added bonus.
2. The default for WordPress is to give each new post a number, which it appends to the end of the URL. Google likes to see meaningful words in URLs, so I went into Settings and updated the Permalinks field. Now, each URL reflects the title of my blog (that’s the important bit) and the date it was published. I can also manually edit blog URLs if I feel it will help.
3. Next, I installed a plugin that automatically creates an XML sitemap (Google XML Sitemaps) that pings the major search engines every time I update a post. This makes it easier for them to index all my pages, so at least they know my posts exist. If the search engines don’t know my posts exists, they aren’t going to display them even if someone searches for my keywords and keyword phrases.
4. I then tried (and, I have to admit, failed) to install another plugin that automatically generates tags for each post. Because I couldn’t get it to work, I’m going to have to find another that does the same job – if I don’t want to have to add the tags manually (any suggestions as to what to use would be welcome.)
5. I also added the Add-to-Any plugin, which generates a button at the bottom of every post that gives anyone reading the opportunity to share my post on any social networking site they like. I’ll admit that this might not make my page any more important to Google, because most of these sites will be using the no-follow attribute – but the exposure sure can’t hurt.
6. I did two more things. One is fairly common. I set up a Google Analytics account, and made sure the appropriate code is appended to the bottom of each post. Not exactly an immediate optimisation technique, but it should give me good insight into where any traffic is coming from.
7. The other is less common. I set up a Tynt Tracer account, which not only traces any content that others might copy from my site, but also appends a link back to my site wherever that text is pasted. Instant PageRank points.

As the title of this post says, anyone can do these. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an old pro or a relative newcomer. None of them is difficult, and they can all add serious value to your site.

The next couple of posts will be about the other things I’m doing, including Keyword searches and site promotion. They should be up within the next few days.

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