Any blog owner has an inter­est in search engine opti­miza­tion / mar­ket­ing whether they know it or not. For what­ever rea­sons, you have cho­sen to setup one of the best traf­fic dri­ving forces on the web today. I’ve been work­ing on the web with Word­Press for over 5 years now, and I’ve tried many dif­fer­ent plu­g­ins to improve my traf­fic rat­ings. Here I’ll dis­cuss some of the tools I use to suc­cess­fully drive traf­fic to my blog.

#1: Head­Space for title tag management

Head­Space is a plu­gin for Word­Press that allows you to cre­ate dynamic title tags based on page con­tent. Head­Space also allows you to cre­ate spe­cial sce­nar­ios for cer­tain types of pages, such as a 404 page or indi­vid­ual post pages. Head­Space has a full GUI inter­face that is easy to use and easy to setup. It’s no secret that rich title tags will improve your search engine ranking.

Head­Space also has an auto-tagging fea­ture that will plu­gin to the Yahoo! Tag­ging API to auto-generate / sug­gest rel­e­vant tags based on your post content.

#2: Make use of update services

One of the best parts about using Word­Press is that it has the abil­ity to auto­mat­i­cally con­tact web ser­vices and alert them when new con­tent is avail­able. I’ve opti­mized my blog by extended the defauly list to include many pop­u­lar update ser­vices. The ser­vices I list under “Set­tings > Writ­ing” include:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

I’ve gath­ered these sources from a arti­cles writ­ten at The Weblog Zone.

#3: No-Ping-Wait Word­Press Plugin

I highly rec­om­mend using the No-Ping-Wait Word­Press Plu­gin. This plu­gin will save blog­gers from hav­ing to wait for all of the update ser­vices to respond to the new post pings.

#4: Max Blog Press Ping Opti­mize Plugin

I also rec­om­mend that you install Max Blog Press Ping Opti­mizer. This Word­Press plu­gin will pre­vent your blog from post­ing pings for every change you make to your blog. Basi­cally the MaxBlog­Press Ping Opti­mizer will pre­vent your blog from get­ting tagged as ping spammer.

#5: Use Google Trends to research your tar­get keywords

Google Trends allows you to see what the vol­ume of searches are for par­tic­u­lar key phrases and where they are com­ing from in the world.

#6: Use Google Insights for Search to see what the world is search­ing for

With Google Insights for Search you can fol­low pop­u­lar search trends (which means you can basi­cally see what your tar­get mar­ket finds inter­est­ing). An added value of this tool is the com­par­i­son pos­si­bil­i­ties. You can com­pare between spe­cific time peri­ods, coun­tries, cat­e­gories and cre­ate com­bined filters.

What else can I do?

As always, I have a few oth­ers left up my sleeve. If peo­ple seem to find this help­ful and use­ful I’ll do a fol­low up on the subject.