Nikas Culinaria

So, as you learn more about the technical aspects of blogging and the search-o-sphere (my term so dont freak if you have not heard it before) you will learn one thing consistently - that you know even less than you thought you did on your most modest-ego day.

You could get lost for days in all the very germane topics on ProBlogger - how to make money, how to increase page rank, why you want to increase page rank or traffic or ad payout or vague kharma, etc. Darren Rowse, the prolific writer behind ProBlogger, has an excellent series of posts that can help you be a better blogger at 31 Days to Building a Better Blog.

I have decended into recursive fits of anxiety over doing SEO or search engine optimization. Because I use Wordpress on my own server, this can be remedied in a methodical manner but just when I think I have figured it out and thought I had done the “Right” thing, I find that I have missed something.

If you are lost in SEO-land, there is a tool (actually a set of tools) that will help you run diagnostics on your blog SEO status.

Surf over to SEO Tools and start with their free tool called “SEO Analyzer”. The other tools on the nav bar across the upper part of the page are good too.

SEO analyzer will tell you if your blog is optimized, by how much, and, more importantly, just how it sucks, if it does indeed suck (as my blogs usually do at some point :-).

Another site that gives several SEO metrics on your site is SEOmoz.org with it’s SEOmoz.org page strength tester.

If you do not know what SEO is, dont worry about it. Its not important until you are ready to deal with it.

Those of you running Wordpress, you can install nofollow language with a plugin that will help with your pagerank standings and SEO - here is a link to one of those plugins (I am running WP 2.1 with this plugin and it works fine, right now).

Let me know where you are at in SEO land in the poll below.

ProBlogger

31 Days to Building a Better Blog at ProBlogger

SEO Analyzer

SEOmoz.org page strength tester

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