Here's my comment: content is King. With 'not much there' SEO is a pointless exercise, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be forward-looking eh?

By "theme" do you mean topic of discussion? If so you should make each major topic be a blog. Sports, Code, Devil Worship, Day Care Business. I like stub files because they make nice-looking URLs, and from an SEO angle it can't hurt.

BTW I know nothing about SEO other than without content you're not gonna get far.

Once you set your highest level of importance (the blog topics) you can take care of categorizing your posts as you see fit. Also possibly match the skin to the topic so your real audience gets happy. Your 'Devil Worship' readership probably would want something a bit brighter than what your average 'Code' reader would be into ;)

Don't clutter your pages - especially your permalinks - with stuff that isn't your content. Be neither cheap nor a slut about outbound links, and make sure what you have is somehow related to the blog's topic. Have well-formed pages (xhtml and css validation). But most of all, have content!

(And if my limited experience means anything, post naughty words in big sizes that have nothing to do with anything on your blog and the search engines will send you tons of traffic. Forever. Even long after you change the title. And deprecate the post. And go off-line for a while.)

EdB wrote:

(And if my limited experience means anything, post **** words in big sizes that have nothing to do with anything on your blog and the search engines will send you tons of traffic. Forever. Even long after you change the title. And deprecate the post. And go off-line for a while.)

You'll get penalized by Google now ;)

But if you can insert it just for a day, it will work. If you really want to this style, be sure to have Google bots regularly visiting you first, so that within the 24-hour period you'll put the catch-post, you'll be sure Google already indexed it. In other words, get your content out first :D

I suggest the same thing, seperate different "Supra Topics" into different blogs, exploit b2evo's multi-blog system. If you are using v2 already, then the more reason you should.

Example, in my blog, I have a blog named "Tech", which is a supra topic.
1) Tech in itself is a blog;
2) It also aggregates other 'tech' related blogs I have, for example: "WebDev".

WebDev is a topic that deserves a separate blog (in my opinion). Anything I post under the "WebDev Blog" is also shown on the "Tech blog" while maintaining the ability to post topics directly under the "Tech Blog".

That also helps alot with getting your content out there.
Finally use: Feedburner for your Feeds (I strongly suggest using "Atom 1.0" not "RSS"). Search Engines nowadays also indexes XML Feeds, that will add exposure to you on search engines.

And create eye-n-click catchy titles (which I only learned recently), it works. But be careful, be sure your title has to do with your post content, Google and Yahoo, if I'm not mistaken, penalizes blogs that use a title that has nothing to do with it's content ;)

Laibcoms wrote:

You'll get penalized by Google now ;)

It was funny for a while, but wow the traffic from a post that was obviously spoofing SEO stuff by blatantly spamming search engines gave me TONS of traffic!

Laibcoms wrote:

I suggest the same thing, seperate different "Supra Topics" into different blogs, exploit b2evo's multi-blog system.
...
Example, in my blog, I have a blog named "Tech", which is a supra topic.
1) Tech in itself is a blog;
2) It also aggregates other 'tech' related blogs I have, for example: "WebDev".

Exactly! I play online because I want to, and chuckle at what actually makes my traffic happen, but for a fact no one interested in my collection of hang glider rack images (rackblog) is going to care at all about my b2evolution and javascript stuff (hackblog). In my uninformed mind I think people will read me more if I stay topical, so I sort my stuff into very broad categories. And search engines are just like people. Sort of...

Yep. Very specific topics gets less attention and harder to invade especially if there are too much of that specific topic available already.

But staying broader gives more option.
It is also harder to put content on topics that are too specific unless you will be very dedicated with it and ignore the rest. Like a friend of mine who is earning a lot with his "Second Life" blog.

I have one specific topic blog, though getting too low even though it was linked already from the MMORPG's main website hehe.. so to this point, I'm still not convinced when other gurus say "specific-topics" will get you the money.

:p

Thanks. I am still not sure what to think about this. SEO is a page-targeted thing - right? I mean, google returns pages, not sites (right?).

So if I search for "foo bar" in google, and I have 7 blog posts on "foo bar" in my blog with nice SEO optimized permalinks -- does google care that I also talk about "dev null" and "core dump" on my site too?

I can see that readers would care -- they don't want "dev null" junk in their RSS feeds if they only care about "foo bar".

But, does Google care?

Thanks for all your patient and thoughtful responses by the way. I love b2evo. I am amazed by the quality of it.

Mark

It really depends on the algorithms and other criteria of the search engines. For example, on Google, it is known that they have some penalization on if their bots think the sites and/or pages are very similar in content. For Google its a form of cheating the system.

They have other 'checks' if you will which the public doesn't know (and which search engines will never reveal, unless someone leaks it out).

You can say that SEO is mainly a page-targeted thing, but it still depends on how the bots sees your pages. If you put nofollow and noindex in all your other internal links, then the bots will only index your main page -> www.domain.tld - and nothing else. So results will always point to that instead of the actual post.

Then if that post is now on your pages 2, 3, etc. then it will disappear from the search engine results, if not, it will stil point to your main page (which isn't correct anymore).

That's how I noticed when I did experiments on my own, I'm not an expert on SEO, but based on my experience, that's one thing how it works. :)