When you are choosing a blog platform, you will have to keep in mind the 12 basic SEO issues. It is a good thing that many blog platforms meet these basic SEO requirements and they are naturally a good choice for blogging. Here are some of the things that you should keep in mind while choosing the blog platform for the best SEO results.

1.  Title Tag Customization and Rules:

Title tag customization is important for SEO and unfortunately most of the free blogging platforms lack this feature. Some of the blogging platforms allow you to add plugins which will then enable you to make these changes. So if you are choosing a blogging platform which has no options for title tag customization, then make sure that there is an external plugin available to do the same.

2.  Static, Keyword-Rich URLs:

Keyword rich URLs is the next thing that you will not want to miss in a blogging platform. Fortunately many good blogging services help you with this. They allow you to customize the URLs and make them keyword rich. WordPress is an excellent example which gives you plenty of options. The other blogs will generally have lot of numbers in the URL names which are not SEO friendly.

3.  Meta Tag Customization:

Meta tag customization may not be of that huge importance when it comes to SEO. But you should look at this as well while choosing the blogging platform. The blogs are bad in this case. You will not find it easy to define meta tags in your blogs. This is a problem that most of the bloggers have been facing. Specifying tags will work for the social bookmarking websites and blog search engines but what about meta tags? If you are a wordpress user, you can find many external add-ons.

4.  Enabling Custom HTML Tags:

Now when it comes to the custom HTML tags, the blogs do allow that. You will have to go to the HTML editor instead of putting them in the visual mode. Depending upon the CSS style sheet, you can use various HTML tags. Another handy thing is the facility to add ‘nofollow’ to the URLs. This really is a wonderful feature and all the blogging platforms allow you to do this.

5.  Internal Anchor Text Flexibility:

Internal links are important and you need a blog platform where you can easily customize the anchor text for internal links. Fortunately almost all the blogs give you this option. You can easily customize the internal anchor text on any blogging platform. Adding nofollow to certain links which are of not huge importance is another feature.

6.  Intelligent Categorization Structure:

Categories are important. You will need to categorize your content according to its type. Now this is not a problem with most of the blogging platforms. WordPress takes the lead and it even allows you to give a special description for each category.

7.  Pagination Controls/Duplicate Content:

Pagination is an important thing to work on. You will have different option depending upon where your content is being hosted. If the content is being hosted on your own server, you will have different options than the ones you will have while hosting the content on a free server. If you are hosting the content on your server, then you can add nofollow to the content that you do not want to be crawled. Changing the robots.exe is another useful thing to do. You can control the search engine crawling by changing this file.

8.  301 Redirect Functionality:

If you have your own hosting environment, then you can do great things with the 301 redirect functionality. But among the free servers, wordpress gives you good plugins to deal with this.

9.  XML/RSS Pinging:

XML and RSS pinging is the back bone of every blogging platform. If some blogging platform does not include this, it would be very debatable to consider it as a blogging platform.

10.  Image Handling and ALT Tags:

Image handling is another thing that most of the blog platforms offer. At least all the good blogging platforms offer this. WordPress is an amazing blogging platform which offers you complete control over the ALT tags. Keep in mind that you will have a limited quota to upload according to your solution.

11.  CSS Exceptions:

CSS control is another important thing to take notice of while choosing the blogging platform. With your own server, you can do whatever you want with CSS rules but with the free servers, you will only have limited or no control over it.

12.  Static Caching Options:

Static caching options are given to the free bloggers. This is something that you will not have to worry about. If you have hosted elsewhere, you may face problems when you are using the wordpress installation. It keeps coming up with the MySQL queries. Movable Type provides a better solution by creating a static page whenever you publish a post.