If you happen to use WordPress for your blog (or even as a CMS), you should be aware of some pitfalls that can hurt your SEO rankings.  Many of the theme that you download from various sources might look great but the minute you veer from the classic or default themes, you open the probability for issues.  Fortunately there’s some pretty easy solutions depending on your need to improve the visibility.

1. Proper use of <h#> tags
Many themes I’ve looked at do not use <h1>, <h2> and so forth properly.  Remember that the search engines (and POSH) dictate that the header tags place emphasis on specific information (which should include things like the title, the date of publication or the author).  Comb through the single post and main index templates to make sure there is consistent use of both <h1> and <h2> tags (at the very least, and preferably <h3> as well) and adjust the CSS to get the look and feel you want instead of relying on class-based <div> markup.

2. Too many links on the index page
Two problems here - first, the increase in links (past 40) decreases or dilutes the value of importance placed on the page.  At the very least, push the most important posts on the front page and consider whether or not you need the others.  Second, why are you sending people elsewhere in the first place?  Sure your friends might run a great blog but do you really need 100 listings in your blogroll?  Consider that external links in your posts should not go past 2 each and that you should keep the total number of links as close to 40 as possible.

3. Bad keyword choices
Especially on the main index page, it is critical that you consider your choice of keywords and mold your page to the proper density.  Use a free tool like Google’s Keyword Tool to find ones if you’re unfamiliar with structuring keywords.

4. Alt and title text
Always, always, always include alt attribute text on images and preferably include a title attribute on links and lists so that search engines know what tags to associate with the image.

5. Unique keywords
Every page in the site should have a) unique titles and b) different keywords.  You may even opt to remove the name of your blog from the page title because in the end it’s just a vanity thing isn’t it?  There are several plugins that can help you do this by converting the text and tags on the posts into the keywords and description <meta> elements.

6. Fix your markup
Bad markup is, well, just bad.  This goes for both the HTML as well as the RSS feeds.  By default (the newer versions of) WordPress provides at least 4 places to get the feeds from: www.domain.com/feed/, www.domain.com/comments/feed/, www.domain.com/wp-rss.php, and www.domain.com/wp-rss2.php and you should provide appropriate links to them as needed.

Now many of you (all 5 reading this post) are probably asking why I don’t even follow these rules necessarily and the fact of the matter is that for this blog, I don’t personally care.  I publish this for information purposes and largely for my students, not really for the public at large.  Should I teach by example, sure I should; but there are many other ways to get this information across, so I do as I wish.