In my new video tutorial package — 7 Steps to Optimizing Your WordPress Blog — I give the “best practices” I’ve used from more than a year and a half of blogging to garner more than 60 percent of my site’s traffic from the search engines (namely Google).

One “best practice” or step that I offer for free is this vide on How to Tweak Your Meta Tags on Your WordPress Blog.

Here’s how to do this and what I suggest …

To put in your new meta tags, go to Presentation / Theme Editor and then click on the header.php theme file.

In your Header theme file, you’ll want to add meta “description” and “keywords” for your site. (See the video for

Here’s the code you’ll want to include inside this header area, with sample content from my website:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Most important keyword phrases, more keyword phrases, even more keyword phrases, to Less important keyword phrases”>

<meta name=”description” content=”Put in a 1-2 sentence description of your site that will be displayed in Google”>

Download the meta tag sample of the accompanying ebook tutorial here

Why These Meta Tags?

I suggest the Meta Tag Description because often Google and the search engines will use the Meta Tag Description in their search results for your site. Here is how it looks for this site in Google for the general keyword search of “cory miller”:

And the Meta Tag Keywords also show the search spiders what keywords you want your site to be included for … I think it’s just one more indicator and way to highlight the main keywords you want to be found for in the search engines. I would caution against overloading this meta tag with keywords that your blog doesn’t cover. Just pick out the main ones and highlight them here.

OK, that’s it … you can purchase the rest of the 7 Steps to Optimizing Your WordPress Blog here, which includes my QuickStart Guide to Using WordPres ebook as well, for an introductory price of $67.

One of my clients, Jonathan Fields, just asked a bunch of great bloggers (including me) this question for a post on blog marketing:

“If you had 2-hours a day to devote to no-cost, off-blog (even off-line) marketing for your blog, what would you do?”

I’m privileged to have my answer included among an all-star blogging cast that includes Darren Rowse, Penelope Trunk, Maki at DoshDosh, Chris Garrett and a bunch of others  … you can also Digg it here.

Check out the full post here.

As I’m continuing to see more and more “Most Popular” lists pop up on blog sidebars, I thought it was time to share my experience with them and give a couple of reasons why they are probably a good idea for your blog. Read More→

I’ve been reading Dosh Dosh, a site dedicated to helping you make money online, for a couple of months now and have been impressed by not only the practical advice I’ve gleaned off it, but also the style and quality of blog writing you can find there. So I emailed Maki a couple of questions to see if he’d share his expertise with you all.

Here’s the outstanding answers he sent to my questions:

1. You write consistently excellent titles … what quick advice can you give for helping business bloggers?

Read More→

The beauty of the web is that you can instantly change things and quickly see how they work.

It’s so fast and caters to my drive to constantly improve what I’m doing on the web.

And with statistics programs like Google Analytics, I can look back and quickly see if what I’ve done has worked, or failed miserably.

So my mantra is: Tweak and Test. Repeat.

I’m constantly tweaking, changing, tinkering with my sites to help them achieve my goals and objectives more efficiently. It still amazes me when I look at my stats after I tinker, or how full my email inbox is (or empty) when I make a change.

Here are some quick steps for how I go about tweaking and testing on the web:

1. Get a good stats program so you can compare what you’ve done.
2. Read broadly. Online and offline.
3. See what others are doing and test those tactics.
4. Focus on your goals and objectives.

ONE RECENT EXAMPLE

Today, I retooled my blog design page after realizing a lot of my prospective clients were asking similar questions and looking for similar things. I want to help qualify them better for a sale, so I can more easily close the deal. (Another benefit is not having to repeat certain things in my email correspondence!)

But also, after doing some research on creating effective landing pages and reviewing my stats for the last month, I realized I could tweak this vital page, consolidate other pages into one, and test it for a couple of weeks.

I’ll probably tinker with the wording quite a bit. In fact, probably obsessively. But I know that the right words, the right flow will help me achieve my goals for my business.

So, we’ll see how it works … if it doesn’t … it’s time to tweak again.

I love WordPress if you can’t tell. We only do custom WordPress blog design.

So you know why I love it when I see big-time bloggers like MicroPersuasion’s Steve Rubel making the switch.

John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing has already done it. And I talk with more and more TypePad bloggers wanting to make the switch.

With WordPress’ awesome import features, it’s really a snap to do.