SEO Review – Pine Tree Paradise

As part of our sponsorship of the 2010 Wordcount Blogathon, we were happy to give away a free SEO review to one Blogathon participant. The winner, Charles Newbery, has a fun blog about his life raising a family as a work-at-home American dad who just happens to be living in Argentina!

The blog is called Pine Tree Paradise, and aside from the excellent writing quality, the hand-drawn pictures created by the kids are excellent.

On to the SEO review and tips.

SEO Review

I completed our standard on-site review, but rather than focusing on benchmarking the Pine Tree Paradise blog with competitors, I decided to offer some more SEO suggestions and find some good links instead. The reason? Benchmarking works great when you’re trying to compete for a set of keywords, but when a blog is more personal, the keywords aren’t nearly as competitive…so benchmarking is sort of unnecessary.

Charles has told me that his goals are to raise his profile as a writer and promote the Pine Tree Paradise blog, with the eventual goal being to turn Pine Tree Paradise into a book, sponsored blog, etc. To that end, I would recommend the following:

1. Add the name “Charles Newbery” to the homepage title tag. We want to make sure that people find this blog if they search for Charles by name. I would also suggest making the home page title tag more specific – something like “Pine Tree Paradise – Charles Newbery Argentina work-at-home Dad”. The title tag doesn’t have to make legible sense…it’s just for search engines really.
2. Incorporate some sort of subscribe link in the blog header menu. When Charles builds a large base of followers/readers, it will be much easier for him to acquire a blog sponsor, publish a book, etc.
3. Add a social bookmarking widget to the sidebar and/or each blog post so that people can “Like” the site or a post on Facebook, submit a blog post to StumbleUpon, etc. Check out the Simple Social plugin.
4. Blog directory submission is a good way to raise a blog’s profile and build search engine credibility. Here are some good blog directories:

• http://blogs.botw.org/ – It costs money, but it’s a great quality link.
• http://www.blogcatalog.com/
• http://www.bloggeries.com/index.php
• http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=addblog – Free, only takes a second
• http://technorati.com/ – Free, but great quality link
• http://www.mybloglog.com/ – The downside to submitting here is that you need to include their resource-heavy badge in your sidebar, but participation will generate traffic.
• http://portal.eatonweb.com/ – Another paid submission, this is a great quality link…but it’s tough to get in (sometimes)

Here’s my top 10 SEO suggestions based on my on-site review:

1. Install Google XML sitemaps plugin. The blog currently doesn’t have an XML sitemap, something that search engines use to find every page on a site. Adding an XML sitemap is a good way to increase traffic from search engines.
2. Focus on traffic-generating keywords in blog posts when possible. While I’m not advocating anything that will take away from the creative aspects of the blog, there are some opportunities to target traffic generating keywords in blog posts. This post about driving your dog instead of walking it could generate some search engine traffic if the post focused on the keywords “driving your dog.” This could be done by editing the permalink for the post, making sure these keywords appear in any image file names you upload, alt tags for these images, as well as using some bold or italic text for this keyword once or twice in the post.
3. Write HTML title tags to include keywords. HTML title tags should be 65 characters or shorter – longer titles are cut off and vital keywords in title tag may be lost.
4. Edit permalink text (on new posts only) to include keywords. The default WordPress setting is to make the permalink the same as the title of a blog post. However, you can change that setting so that the link to the post contains keywords without changing the title of the post into something keyword focused. This is something that shouldn’t be done after the fact – once a post is published, it’s a bad idea to change the permalink.
5. Rename images files before uploading to include keywords, and if you number them, separate the numbers with a dash. I.E., mr-mom-002.jpg instead of mr-mom002.jpg. Search engines can’t decipher “mom002″ so we have to break it out for them.
6. Use 3-5 word image “alt” tags, including a keyword or two. Avoid “stop words” like the, a, is, an, of, with, etc., in your alt tags. Alt tags are just for search engines and people that can’t see your images – it’s OK if they’re sentence fragments.
7. Think about a gallery for all those cool pictures. A dedicated gallery of all the pictures drawn by your children would be link-worthy content, not to mention helping you leverage Google image search to generate visitors. I suspect that a lot of people are searching for cute drawings done by kids.
8. Install the Use Google Libraries plugin. Your theme Thesis loads a few JS files that can be pulled from Google instead. Without getting technical, this plugin will make your site much, much faster. Site speed is one of the factors that influences Google rankings.
9. Edit META description tags. Think of a meta description tag as a two sentence long “ad” for each blog post. It should be descriptive and generate a little mystery that encourages people to read the full post. META description tags often show up on search results pages as the description associated with a particular page. Also, be sure to keep them to less than 150 characters. The homepage meta description tag, for example, is a little too long.
10. Add a privacy policy. Nothing special – you can use this Privacy Policy generator to make something quick and simple. Privacy policies should be included on every website for a number of reasons, but especially so when that website collects any personal info (like an email address). It’s OK to make the link sort of hard to find – stuffing it in the footer is good enough to meet any legal requirements. In addition to covering the bases, I believe that Google views the presence of a privacy policy as a quality signal…so it’s good SEO to have one.

Final SEO Thoughts

SEO can be challenging when the topic of your blog isn’t precisely defined with a handful of keywords. In fact, I would say that business blogs have it easy compared to personal/fiction blogs like Pine Tree Paradise because they can focus on a narrow topic defined by a handful of keywords.

However, there’s a definite benefit in using some SEO tricks I’ve listed in every post, even when the keywords significantly change from post to post. Following these suggestions might only generate an extra 5 or 10 visits per month on each blog post, but with 200 blog posts written so far, that’s an extra 1,000 to 2,000 visitors each month.

One other note: Charles should be commended for declaring a specific blog post schedule. It’s critical to building an audience, and a lot of bloggers (including myself) aren’t brave enough to declare when new blog posts can be expected.