Designing a new blog or website from scratch gives you the perfect opportunity to implement some basic on page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tricks. Despite the fact that most on page SEO changes are relatively easy to do, I frequently see sites that fail to do so so here are three easy to implement, high impact SEO changes you should make sure you take into consideration when designing a blog.

1. Titles. Making sure that your targeted keywords appear in the titles of each page is essential. The search engines will not only display this title in the search results, but they use it as a key factor in determining the content of your site. Using a CMS like WordPress makes this light work as it largely does it for you. You can also extend this functionality by adding a plugin such as All in one Seo, which allows you to add keyword or your site title into the title of every page.
2. Meta Tags. These don’t have the same impact they use to years ago, and arguably the meta keywords are next to useless, but ensuring that you have a good meta description is still important as its this that will likely appear in the search results. This is easy to edit simply using <META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Your description goes here.”> in the head section of the site or if you use a plugin like AIOSEO then you can simply use that, which will also dynamically generate meta keywords for you.
3. Friendly Urls. This basically means that instead of having a page title like this www.example.com/?pgid=7172 , you have a nice readable title such as www.example.com/example-page . This allows the search engines to get a further indication of what your page is about, and allows for a much more readable title for humans.  Using WordPress it is very easy to set your URLS to do this, simply by changing the Permalinks settings to something like /%postname%/ rather than the default.
4. Header Tags. Simply put, the most important words on the page should be between <H1> tags, then <H2> etc… This tells the search engines that whatever is between those tags is probably what the content is generally about. You can adjust the size of the H1 tag by using CSS to make the page look nice, but don’t overuse them. As a general rule of thumb, the Title of the page/post should be a H1 tag, and then any subtitle can be a H2 then leave it at that. Remember, try and get your keywords into the titles and between those header tags!

There are obviously many more factors that you can implement, but these are a good starting point. If your blog doesn’t follow the four SEO rules above then I recommend you make some changes quickly as you are probably missing out on a lot of traffic!

James