First impressions are so important when it comes to your blog (it’s important in life too, but I know nothing about that topic). So what do you need in your blog to make a great first impression? A badass template, with some killer graphics, awesome pictures, and catchy domain name right… NOPE! Your first impression can begin way before your site is even visited.

Open up Google and perform a search. I typed in “the beatles” and it returned the usual 10 results on the first page. Take a look at the 10 results and tell me what you see first. Ahhhhhh!. Links with the page titles of all 10 sites that are returned! There’s your first impression of the site, and you haven’t even clicked on the link yet. And see how they give you a preview of what to expect when you go to the site? Some titles are better at enticing the reader to come to their site than others. Some are more general and not helpful at all. Make sure your titles are written like a big OPEN sign, telling the reader what you have to offer on the page, and tell them to come on in!

Aside from a first impression, page titles are one of the most important factors when it comes to search engine optimization. Get your keywords in your title because search engines rely heavily on a good title for page ranking. Organic traffic from search engines are some of the best traffic you can get on your site, so get more of it!

With so much weight put on page titles, why would you ignore them? Here are a few guidelines I like to follow when creating my titles.

Take your time thinking of a good title - You spend so much time on your post, don’t let the title be an after thought. You want to make a good impression right? You want to get more hits right? Do your title justice, give it some thought and planning.

Include your keywords - As I mentioned earlier, search engines rely heavily on page titles. Make sure to include some keywords there. It’s valuable real estate for SEO. Don’t waste it.

Describe your post - Don’t leave the reader guessing what to expect when they enter your site.Give them a general idea of what they will be reading. We are too impatient on internet. We want to find what we want, and we want to find it fast. Help the reader figure out if your site is where they want to go and they will thank you with their clicks.

Use something catchy - Try to set yourself apart from the other links on the Google search page. But… don’t use gimmicks to trick them to visit your site. No need to title your site ‘Free Beatles Autographs” when you can’t really offer it for free. That will only annoy the visitor. Needless to say, they won’t stay on your site very long and they will not return.

Now we get to the fun part of this whole blogging thing. Let’s get your WordPress setup so that search engines will have an easy time indexing your site. This is my favorite part of blogging, aside from blogging itself.

Let me start by reminding you that there are so many different ways to accomplish this. This is intended to show you the easy way to get rolling with a WordPress install that search engines will like. You can obviously get obsessed with the whole SEO thing, and do every tip known to man. That’s great, but you’ll also have less time to do more important things, such as BLOG! Don’t forget, this is WordPress, Made Easy…

1. CONTENT! - I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Content is King”. Well, you better believe it! I cannot stress this point enough. It really should be items #1 thru #9 and the rest fall into item #10. If you only provided good content and skipped the rest of the steps, you’d be better off than only skipping this part. Serious!
2. Page Title - Your page title is one of the most important on-page factors that affect your rank. This is very valuable real estate on your site. Don’t waste it with the default WordPress titling scheme. I use the All-In-One SEO plug in. See our other post on using page titles effectively to land a great first impression and maximize organic traffic.
3. Optimize your Permalinks - Your URL is a nice place to load keywords. Make it readable to search engines. We’ve written a whole post on customizing your permalink structure. Just do it.
4. Optimize Internal Links - In almost every post I write, I look for opportunities to link to other posts in my site. Doing this helps create a flow to your site and helps evenly distribute traffic to your posts. Think of it as detour signs for your site traffic. Help direct your visitors to posts you think are important. Search engines also follow these road signs and index what they find along the way.