SEO Basics for the WoW Blogger
Following Yashima’s mishap with one of the scumbag gold-selling splogs we all hate, it struck me that some WoW Bloggers may have little notions on how to improve their search engine visibility.
This post will be focused on self-hosted WordPress blogs, but some elements may be applicable to other platforms as well.
First, what is SEO, and why would your WoW blog want it?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a field of activity which covers an innumerable amount of methods to promote a website. These methods are in general roughly divided into so called white hat activities, considered fully legit by search engines, and black hat, which if caught will get your site blacklisted. While most search engines have different rules of what is black hat and what not, as a very rough rule of fist, anything which is devised to deceive a search engine or artificially inflate your search results is to be considered off-limits.
The purpose of starting to apply some SEO techniques is to boost your search engine traffic and ensure all the wonderful, smart, funny, witty, insightful posts you write are positioned properly.
A word of warning before we begin, though. No search engine has published how their indexing mechanisms work exactly, nor how they rate content internally. As a consequence, the field of SEO theory has always been full of exploratory techniques which would turn out, later on, to be totally worthless. Fortunately, we’re going to focus on the basics and these are quite straightforward.
As to the question of whether it’s worth it, well, in the grand scheme of things Altitis is a very small blog. Before Wrath (and due to a low posting volume), my readership was in average below 150 visits a day. If you were to Google last Friday (when I started writing this post) and type “death knight macros” as the search term, though, I was sitting in 4th position with my post about the ghoul leap suppression. Ahead of scores of sites focused on macros, ahead of wowwiki, dedicated DK sites, and even the o-bards.
Since Wrath was released, my readership sits between 400 and 600 visits a day, without ever getting linked by the big names (EJ or WoWInsider). All of the additional visits come from search engines, mostly Google.
Worth it? Well, I don’t have advertisements on the site, but I still like the fact that my posts are being read, so I’d say yes, it’s definitely worth it for me.
Setting Up
First thing first. Before anything else, make sure your blog is actually allowing search engines. On WordPress, it’s under Settings -> Privacy. Blogger definitely has that setting as well, under Settings->Basic->Let Search Engines find your blog. Others? You tell me 
Second, make sure your blog is known and recognized by Google. Blogger users have a slight advantage over others here as they will be included in some capacity even if they do nothing beyond changing the privacy settings. Nonetheless, start by visiting Google Webmaster Central and follow the Submit your content to Google procedure. Next, sign in to webmaster tools, and authenticate your site. Webmaster tools aren’t really good for a lot of things as much of the information is stale, inaccurate or way too plentiful to be of any practical use, but the diagnostics page can point out a couple of interesting elements to check and fix. Among these, keywords and meta descriptions.
For WordPress users, a good way to improve drastically the context of your posts – that is, providing some additional information to search engines to help them catalog your posts, or in other words, to give them some clues what your post is about, is to grab the plug-in All-in-One-SEO Pack.
The reason you want to use and configure this plugin is simple, it gives you a simple and handy way to edit meta keywords and descriptions for all your posts, which will appear as an additional set of fields in your edit post page. The settings are pretty self-explanatory, but basically you will want to fill in some generic recurring elements (like “world of warcraft” for the home keywords”) in there at the very least, for the general context of what you’re writing about.
In the post editor page, under the All in One SEO Pack menu you will have an opportunity to enter some specific keywords and a short description of what the page is about. Note that while not all search engines will use these, they are better filled in than left out. Descriptions should ideally have between 80 and 160 characters (more might get ignored, less are flagged as “short descs” by Google) and should be unique for each post.
Next, a very important element, the post slug, or permalinks – in short the url under which an individual post can be reached. Blogger users have little in terms of options here but in your Settings->Archive Settings make sure you have Enable Post Pages active. This is important so that the search engines index each post individually instead of just an ever-changing front-page where whatever search results fall off every 10 posts or so.
For WordPress users, you have many different choices in how to configure permalinks, under Settings->Permalinks. There are many schools of thought about permalinks, but one of the most basic one is to make sure these actually add to search visibility. That is, your permalink should be explicit and probably reflect your post title. The default setting in WordPress (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com) is to a simple numerical value. This is bad, as the numbers not only aren’t telling any story at all, but if for whatever reason you migrate your database the posts may get re-numbered, and all search results pointing to any specific posts will end up in a wrong place. You could further improve visibility by making the permalink text a rephrased version of your post title. For the rest, there are divergent opinions of what else should be part of the permalinks – just the post’s name, or the full date, just the month or just the year. The majority opinion seems to be the shorter the better (so no dates at all or just the year), but full dates are quite popular on some SEO trendsetters’ own blogs as well. As long as the permalinks are explicit, you’d probably have to work at Google to know which of the other options are best.
Last but not least, to improve the search engine’s knowledge of your blog’s content, you will want to generate a sitemap. The best way to do that is to use the Google XML Sitemap plugin. Once you create your sitemap, make sure to go back to Webmaster Central and link to the sitemap from here. As you will see in the plugin’s settings, you would be well advised at that stage to also follow through with the other search engines, use their own webmaster tools and make sure the sitemaps are registered there as well.
Duplicate Content? We don’t need no duplicate content!
In general and due to years of abuse by spammers and black hat SEOs, search engines will penalize duplicated content. The problem here is that WordPress in particular is very generous in the way people can access an individual post: by its permalink, by its category (../category/MyCategoryname/permalink) and by its tags (../tag/MyTagName/permalink). A post in two categories will therefore appear in Google’s index at least thrice: by it’s own normal permalink, Category 1 and Category 2. This is bad because Google is said to penalize all results on the theory that it may actually be spam posted all over the web. If you use tags, you can add one additional individual result per tag, which will rapidly dilute the value of your post the more tags you’re using. Last but not least, WordPress 2.7 has added comment pagination, which means you may end up with your normal post’s permalink duplicated with permalink/comment-page-#/ by search engines. Not good.
The best way to fix that is twofold: For most search engines, noindex directives to categories and tag archives will be honoured. The simplest way to implement that is to use a plugin called Robots Meta, it’s configuration is still pretty straightforward. Google is however pretty bad at honouring noindex and nofollow directives, so for these guys, you’ll want to make sure the following is set in your robots.txt file (create this one at the root of your blog’s path, eg altitis.treehuggers.info):
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /comment-page
This will simply prevent Googlebot, the automated scanning engine, to access all links containing these three elements, and sort the issue.
We’re doing it with Style!
Last but not least, remember the good old html heading tags, <h1> to <h5>? Since the advent of CSS, they have often become underused, but in terms of search visibility, that’s probably a mistake. Headings are important as they give additional context, so do use them properly to provide a clear hierarchy to your content. Again, there are a couple of options available to you, but roughly, you should decide how you will build up your blog’s brand. Is each individual post the key element you want to promote? Make sure your post title is styled with <h1> tags. Is your blog’s name the brand you want to promote? Make your blog name a <h1> tag and your individual posts <h2> tags. Everything else should have a lower heading that these, your posts however should probably not be lower than <h2>.
Content is King
Beyond the above basic technical measures, there are almost as many tricks and methods as there are SEO specialists. Whether to investigate the field further for a hobby WoW blog is worth the time or not is up to each individual blogger, but you can easily get lost in the wealth of additional stuff to do (popular things include link-building and the realtively new but still not proven pagerank sculpting, for instance). That being said, the best way to have a good search visibility remains to simply write quality content matching the purpose of your blog. The better your posts, the more people will read it, comment on it or comment about it. In the end, a trackback from your blogging peers will remain a high-value testimonial to the quality, relevance, importance or wittiness of your writings, and no amount of additional SEO techniques can replace that.
