How to choose the right blogging platform

Before handpicking your blogging platform, take an inventory of these 10 utmost important SEO criteria that your future blog must comply with:

1. Title Tag composing

Title of any webpage in your blog should have this flow: unique title tag of post | blog title (or) blog tagline

This is how this post you’re reading is appearing in the SERPs:

Blogging with the search engine in mind.part2 | web traffic solutions for network marketing (or) TrafficCpanel.com

Utilizing this structure for your title tags is beneficial in two ways:

First, search engines tend to put more weigh on the first terms in a title;

Second, your page title will record a higher click-thru rate if the terms it contains match the searched query keywords.

So, use this title tag composing technique with your blog either through the blogging platform natural features or through a plugin. Although is not the only SEO adjustment that is capable of, for WordPress I recommend using All in One SEO Pack or better still Jeff Johnson’s Traffic Getting SEO.

2. Keyword-rich URLs

From an SEO perspective is best to having keyword rich URLs instead of digits-based URLs. Although it doesn’t make a huge difference for the search engines, the key terms should be separated by dashes instead of underscores.

WordPress is the classical example of platform that offer webpage’s URLs customization. Nevertheless, there are platforms that don’t support such a tweak, one example being MovableType.

3. Meta Tags usage

Basically, meta tags are descriptive labels given to websites and webpages. They are extremely useful for blog directories and search engines such as Technorati and bookmarking sites like delicious, stumbleupon and digg.com. Still, their influence is diminished for SEO.

4. Custom HTML Tags

Make use of nofollow tag for sculpting your PageRank. Also, use h1, h2…, tags to give your content a SE friendly structure. Both the nofollow and h1, h2… tags are available in the majority of blogging platform.

5. Internal Anchor Text customization

Customizing anchor text is typically a feature supported by all blogging platforms as you can change anchor texts pointing to different webpages within your blog with relative ease.

6. Category-based Structure

This is a feature that blogging platforms are well equipped with. WordPress detaches as the best choice for intelligent category structuring feature.

7. Duplicate Content

Control over duplicated content depends greatly on whether or not you’re hosting your blog on separate (paid) servers or you’ve chosen a free hosting service, usually provided by the platform producer.

Hosting the blog yourself, gives you full control over the source code, stylesheets and options for inclusion of nofollow, noindex tags or usage of robots.txt command.

8. 301 Redirect Function

This function is best exploited in blogs with independent (sepatate) hosting services. This is especially useful if you plan thorough changes in your blog structure. All blogging software make it easy to exploit.

9. XML/RSS Pinging

Being a feature that separates blogs from classical websites, is considered to be an indispensable function in any blogging platform.

10. Image handling and ALT Tags

Although the majority of blogging applications render control over image handling, not all of them permit easy ALT tag inclusion, except through editing the code by hand.

The solution comes from WordPress where you have total control over ALT tags as you upload the image to the server through the software and fill in the details.

The criteria presented above are for general guidance when blogging with the search engines in mind. As you probably know, WordPress is the leading blog software that enjoys exceptional attention from the freelance community by constantly improving user’s experience with it. Even if drawbacks appear, these are easily surmounted by a wide collection of plugins.

To conclude, I recommend using a WordPress platform with independent, paid hosting and as a must have SEO plugin , Jeff Johnson’s Traffic Getting SEO.
Hope you read the first part of this post.