SEO GUIDE

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

10 SEO Tips for WordPress

By: SEO Portal

WordPress is getting more popular by the day. It enables people to set up a blog, and even a complete website within minutes.With all the great free plugins and designs out there it is really an easy to use and complete blogging solution.I get asked for specific SEO tips for WordPress very often. Basically all the ‘usual’ SEO stuff is also applicable for WordPress.But besides that, there are a few tips for WordPress I’d like to share with you.Here it goes:1. Use PermalinksBe sure to use Permalinks on your blog.By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. These links are hard to spider for search engines, and therefor your postings aren’t indexed as fast and as good as you want to.WordPress offers you the ability however, to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.You can find this option in your Admin panel. Choose ‘Options’ in the menu and there ‘Permalinks’.This brings us immidiately to Tip 2:2. Place your titles up front in your URLsIn the Permalinks section you can choose for the ‘Date and name based’ option. This will place the year, month, day and post title in your URL.For SEO purposes it’s better to have your post title up front. So instead you should choose for the ‘Custom’ option and put in something like:/%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/This will give you an URL like this:http://www.seo-portal.com/section-targeting-for-AdSense/2006/07/06/3. TagsTags are a great SEO addition to your blog. They enable search engines to crawl your website more easily and in addition to that, create specific pages for your tags/keywords.You can install the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin on your WordPress blog. Get the plugin here: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/4. Page TitlesMake sure you set good titles on your pages. We discussed putting the post title up front in your URL. You should do the same thing for your Titles.You can do this by changing the tag in your header.php (located in wp-content/themes/your theme/)You can use the following code in order to get your post title in front, followed by your blog name:<title><?php wp_title(); ?> : <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> 5. Choose your Post Titles carefullyYour Post Titles should be as clear as possible. Don’t stuff your titles with keywords you are targeting with your whole blog.Choose your keywords carefully per posting, and get those words in your Post Title.6. AutolinksCross link to your own posts and pages in your own content. Do this by linking your keywords to the relevant postings.To facilitate this work, you can install the SH-Autolink plugin.7. Related PostsPut links to related posts under your postings. This helps search engines crawling your site and indexing all your postings.You can get a plugin for this here: http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/8. Ping ServicesEverytime you post or edit a posting or page, your WordPress blog can notify lots of sites that you updated your blog.Be sure to use this feature!You can set up this feature in Options >> Writing. You can find a list of sites to ping on the WordPress site:http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services9. Google SitemapsGoogle has a tool for webmasters called Google Sitemaps. This will help Google index your website, and let’s you tell Google which pagesare most important. If you make use of this feature, you will be able to see for what searches your site was shown in the results.This helps you optimizing your appearance in Google.You can use this plugin to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress blog:http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final10. CategoriesCategories help you organize your content. If you have the permalinks turned on, the category names will apear in your URL.This is why it is also very important to name your categories carefully; Try to use keywords to name your categories and don’t be afraid to make a load.WordPress enables you to make use of subcategories and sub-subcategories etc. etc. This way you can narrow down your focus on certain keyword phrases.Consider the following example:You have a website about selling photocamera’s. You could organize your articles/postings like this:fotocamera’s >> Digital camera’s >> SLR >> NikonIf a user would be searching for “digital SLR camera nikon” the deepest nested category would have a good optimized URL for this search as the URL would be something like thiswww.yoursite.com/fotocameras/digital-cameras/SLR/nikon/You can make use of the King Categories Widget to organize your categories:http://www.blog.mediaprojekte.de/cms-systeme/wordpress/wordpress-widget-king-categories/
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Chris writes daily updates on his SEO blog; SEO Portal: www.seo-portal.com For more articles and tips on SEO you can visit www.seo-portal.com

Search Engine Optimization - Tips and Tricks

By: fubrus

Unique content is King. Search engines love new, unique and updated content. If you produce new content at a rate of just one reasonably sized page per day and tied in with the other advice throughout the site, I can almost guarantee you will get good listings. Remember though, write for the visitors but cater for the search engines. If your field of expertise fits into a niche in the market, all the better for you but you must get unique content all you will fall behind.Page Structure. Search engine bots can sometimes get confused with poorly coded html, javascript and other web languages. If the bot has to wait too long or cannot decipher the web language then it will just abandon your site and move on to the next, even if it manages to get through the code it usually leads to poor search engine indexing of your website. You should also keep to widely used file extensions like .htm, .html, .php, .asp for your pages.Loading Speed. The loading speed of your website should be kept to a minimum, if it takes long than 5 seconds on 256kb+ connections then you lose visitors - both real and search engine bots. There are a variety of reasons why pages can load slowly, it may either be your web server, poorly coded server side code like php or client side code like javascript which can slow or even stop your page from loading.Visitor Navigation. This is more an aesthetic feature of your website focused at real visitors but you need to have some sort of standard navigation that is the same throughout your whole site. People can be put off and leave your website if they find it difficult to browse easily, search engine bots may also miss links if they can only be found deep within your site. Try to make as many internal links as possible available on each page.Site Hierarchy. Site hierachy can be great for adding keyword density to your web site. An example of site hierachy working effectively would be this page, seo-advice.php. The full link contains SEO twice - www.seoassistance.com/seo-advice.php which is very beneficial in the way search engines determine your sites relevance to a particular subject. Use your domain, folders and file names to your advantage.Avoid Blackhat SEO. Blackhat SEO is a vast topic that commands little respect from real webmasters as it means using underhand methods to gain search engine rankings, although the site is usually banned quickly. Blackhat SEO includes using link farms, search engine spamming, hidden or disguised text, fake meta tag data, using duplicate content and using doorway pages. I would recommend you stay away from tactics like this as you will end up losing out in the long run.Targeted Linkswaps. Link swaps are great but you must make them work for you. It does little good for you when your going for top search engine positions when your link swaps are untargeted. You should choose some specific keywords for both the link text and the link title text then make sure before you link swap that the other webmaster adds those specific keywords with the link.
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Stiv Medic is owner of several websites,including Fubrus.com .You can find high quality articles in more than 150 different categories.Come and visit www.fubrus.com/seo-traffic-generation.html for more articles on SEO and traffic generation. You are most welcome to submit your own article or to take free content for your website www.fubrus.com

Title Tags That Search Engines (and your customers) Will Love

By: Ben Finklea

In my previous Title Tag article, I introduced the title tag and told you what it is and why it's so important. Now let's discuss how to write a tag that Search Engines (and your customers) will love.There are two competing forces pulling for your title tag's attention. First, the search engines use your title tag to help determine where in their engine your website fits. Second, your customers will see and use your title tag to help them determine if your site has what they're looking for and to remind them what your site is about when they see it in their bookmark list. A good title tag takes care of both.In my previous Title Tag article, I introduced the title tag and told you what it is and why it's so important. Now let's discuss how to write a tag that Search Engines (and your customers) will love.There are two competing forces pulling for your title tag's attention. First, the search engines use your title tag to help determine where in their engine your website fits. Second, your customers will see and use your title tag to help them determine if your site has what they're looking for and to remind them what your site is about when they see it in their bookmark list. A good title tag takes care of both.So, assuming you've got the best keywords, you just put that as the title and your done...right? If that's all you did then you'd be OK but you'd miss out on the full value that a title tag can bring. Let's start with that, though. Our title tag looks like this:Austin Texas MortgagesNow, that works for search engines but not so much for customers. Sure, they'll know that you sell mortgages but they may not remember which company. You always want them to remember who you are. So, you could do this:My Mortgage Co Austin Texas MortgagesOK. That's Good for your customers but it moves the really good keywords out of the first position. (Search engines assume that the most important words come early in the title tag.) So, how about this?:Get Austin Texas Mortgages at My Mortgage CoWell...now you're optimizing for the word "Get". Not so good.How about this:Austin Texas Mortgages by My Mortgage CoThat's pretty good. The keywords are front and center and the company name is right out there where everyone can see it. You could also put a separator of some kind instead of the word "by". Like or - . I think it's more of a personal preference than an important SEO point.Now, go write your own!
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Ben Finklea is the CEO of Austin-based SpryDev SEO & Web MarketingAbout the Author - Text: Ben Finklea is the CEO of Austin-based SpryDev SEO & Web Marketing. Visit SpryDev at www.sprydev.com

Title Tags That Search Engines (and your customers) Will Love

By: Ben Finklea

In my previous Title Tag article, I introduced the title tag and told you what it is and why it's so important. Now let's discuss how to write a tag that Search Engines (and your customers) will love.There are two competing forces pulling for your title tag's attention. First, the search engines use your title tag to help determine where in their engine your website fits. Second, your customers will see and use your title tag to help them determine if your site has what they're looking for and to remind them what your site is about when they see it in their bookmark list. A good title tag takes care of both.In my previous Title Tag article, I introduced the title tag and told you what it is and why it's so important. Now let's discuss how to write a tag that Search Engines (and your customers) will love.There are two competing forces pulling for your title tag's attention. First, the search engines use your title tag to help determine where in their engine your website fits. Second, your customers will see and use your title tag to help them determine if your site has what they're looking for and to remind them what your site is about when they see it in their bookmark list. A good title tag takes care of both.So, assuming you've got the best keywords, you just put that as the title and your done...right? If that's all you did then you'd be OK but you'd miss out on the full value that a title tag can bring. Let's start with that, though. Our title tag looks like this:Austin Texas MortgagesNow, that works for search engines but not so much for customers. Sure, they'll know that you sell mortgages but they may not remember which company. You always want them to remember who you are. So, you could do this:My Mortgage Co Austin Texas MortgagesOK. That's Good for your customers but it moves the really good keywords out of the first position. (Search engines assume that the most important words come early in the title tag.) So, how about this?:Get Austin Texas Mortgages at My Mortgage CoWell...now you're optimizing for the word "Get". Not so good.How about this:Austin Texas Mortgages by My Mortgage CoThat's pretty good. The keywords are front and center and the company name is right out there where everyone can see it. You could also put a separator of some kind instead of the word "by". Like or - . I think it's more of a personal preference than an important SEO point.Now, go write your own!
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Ben Finklea is the CEO of Austin-based SpryDev SEO & Web MarketingAbout the Author - Text: Ben Finklea is the CEO of Austin-based SpryDev SEO & Web Marketing. Visit SpryDev at www.sprydev.com

Some Ways to Improve The Efficiency of Your King Content

By: Mike Pham

There are thousands of articles, books and forum posts which showed that content is king in search engine optimization (SEO). In this article, you can find some ways that can help you improve this king content for your web site.* Content for people first, not for search engines - Some webmasters make a common mistake that they optimize everything for search engines but forget about web visitors. The goal of our website is not only to get high search rankings, but also to sell our service. So you should give your website visitors what they are really looking for. Make sure your content flows naturally and you're not just trying to stuff more keywords in the interest of search engines. If users don't find your content convincing they won't buy from you.* Studying popular search terms - High search engine ranking is meaningless if your website only ranks high on terms nobody searches for. You need to ask your colleagues, vendors, competitors, clients, ... or use online tools (e.g.: wordtracker.com) to identify what keywords which potential customers would use to search your web site, then try to use them often, in titles, and throughout the body.* Building article directory - How can you optimize the content if your web site only offers a simple service? It means there are just several pages in your whole website. So, to increase the content in quality you should write some articles, reviews which are related to your service. A site with more web pages means there are more chances of different terms that will become findable in search engines. You may consider adding free articles to your article directory. On the Internet today, one can find a lot of websites which provide articles free for republishing. Of course you must accept the policy of these web sites and authors before using these articles.* Making a clear website organization - Build a site which is simple to navigate with a well linking structure. Every page should be accessible from at least one text link. It's better to be sparing with image links, Flash, JavaScript drop-down menus, or other codes that are not HTML based... because the search engine crawlers cannot recognize text contained in these kinds of display. In case using them is required, then make sure a text based menu or a sitemap is also included in the Web site. Last but not least, you should use meaningful words in your URLs, use as simple a web page layout and design as possible.In conclusion, it is undeniable that content is king in the kingdom of search engines. The quality of your content is the main factor which decides the success in Internet marketing. So improving your content is very necessary.
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Article by Mike Pham of www.TopTrafficWholesaler.com, a full service online website advertising. We offer easy and fast submission to top 200+ Search Engines And Directories, Free Search Engine Registration, Free Meta Tag Generator, Free Link Popularity Tool and Optimization tips for higher ranking.

Site Owners with SEO: DOs and DON'Ts

By: Mike Pham

As a search engine optimizer, I've had a great opportunity to work with many site owners for website submission and optimization services and had some working experiences to share with you in this article. Site owners come from different categories: e-commerce sites, services or personal pages. Some of them have the expertise in Computers and Internet but most of them are the neophytes in the search engine optimization (SEO) religion. So, the purpose of this article is providing novice site owners with some useful rules of behaviors (DOs and DON'Ts) to come along with their SEO campaigns. * SEO firms DON'T help you out. DO help yourself - Search Engine Optimization process is more and more manipulated and it is becoming the big market nowadays. Many websites are offering SEO service with different costs. They promise that customers' sites will be on top of search engines. If so, who will be kicked out of the list? No one? So if you are a site owner with a small budget and modest knowledge of SEO, lean on SEO firm as just an advisor. They cannot do all the things for you. To help you out in SEO, do it yourself. In most cases, the site owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaigns. * DON'T submit your sites to thousands of search engines and directories - Simply, in reality, there are not even thousands of "engines" to submit to. There are, however, hundreds of search directories, hybrid search engines, free-for-all (FFA) pages and classified ad sites. They are simply a list of unorganized links to the last fifty or so URLs that were submitted to the service. The primary purpose of these sites is to gather email addresses from Web marketers so they can be sent offers for other products and services. By submitting, you are unknowingly giving your consent for them to email you. Some major search engines (e.g.: Google) are not fond of such link farms and may actively ban this type of site. * Repetitive submissions DON'T improve your rankings in search engines - Many site owners misunderstand between search engine submission and search engine optimization. So they just dig in finding as many as possible free submission services on the Internet and hope that someday their site will be on the top. Search engine submission is just the first step to quickly notify the search engines about the nascence of your site on the Internet. How your site grows or how your site is optimized is more important to search engines to place your site at the top of the search index. So repetitive submissions don't work in these cases. Take time to pay more attention to your site's content and link building. * DON'T try to trick the search engines in any way - The search engines today are smarter than you have ever imagined. The techniques like most times keyword repeated in a row (keyword stuffing), same color text used as the background (hidden text), doorway pages.. are obsolete and they may be against you. Search engines don't like to get fooled and they may penalize your site for that. Moreover, be careful with the services like automatic link exchange or buying text links. You can use them on your own but take precautions. * Your websites' exposures on search engines DON'T mean top rankings and web conversions - Some SEO firms guarantee that your sites will be included in search engines. It is so easy because when your site is indexed, it is included in search engines right away and you can see it there by some simple but useless keywords. No one will find you with that keywords or syntaxes. In addition, pay attention to for which search engines the SEO firms will be optimizing your site. It will be easier to get listed on some less-reputed search engines comparing to Google or Yahoo. On the other hand, distinguish between standard and sponsor listing. You must pay for sponsor listing but get less visitors and sales. So make sure you understand clearly what SEO firms are offering. A successful SEO campaign requires the acumen of site owners as well as a tight cooperation between site owners and optimizers. Before the campaign starts, they should discuss the price, the time for the campaign, keyword selection and the specific search engines for optimization.... * DO get familiar with SEO tools such as search engines, HTML, PageRank - Some site owners lean on the webmasters on every task related to their sites (e.g.: add a text link, change page title). In most cases, the site owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaign by getting familiar with SEO tools like search engines, HTML, PageRank. Search engines and PageRank evaluation will help you search for competitors' sites, evaluate the keywords, check sites' link popularity (number of links to your sites) and link saturation (number of pages on your sites have been indexed). Besides, with HTML basic syntax, you can easily exchange links with other sites on your own and stop calling the webmasters all the time for modifying pages with links. * DO start writing today - Site owners may be beginners in SEO but experts in their industries. And today, writing is a significant skill to do SEO. Start writing some articles about your business now and submit them with your backlinks (links to your website) to article directories to increase the popularity of your site. For instance, suppose you were a mother at home and managed an ecommerce site selling some strollers and baby accessories. That will be wonderful if your share your experiences in choosing and using the strollers with other mummies-to-be on some women forum and article directories. Not only are search engines notified but also some potential customers will be attracted to your site. In this article, I've provided the site owners with some basic rules of behaviors to do SEO. They include but not limit to myths about Search Engines, SEO firms, importance of SEO tools and article writing skill. Learning them today to make friends with search engines and shove your competitors aside.
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Article by Mike Pham of TopTrafficWholesaler.com, a leading company in Internet Advertising. Offers international online web site advertising in the form of various banner display advertisement and full web page ads categorized into highly targeted website traffic.

Solutions for 50 Backlinks with PageRank greater than 2

By: Mike Pham

Today, no one can deny the importance of backlinks in Search Engine Optimization, especially in Google Optimization. In this article, you can find some solutions for the goal of 50 backlinks with PageRank greater than 2 for new websites. When this goal is archived, I'm totally sure that the pagerank of your website will be boosted to at least 3 in the next update of Google.There are two main solutions for this goal:- Finding links on our own, not spending money.- Buying text links (backlinks).1. Finding links on our own, not spending money*Methods in this solution include:- Find relevant, quality websites and request for link exchanges. - Submit to quality directories. - Submit testimonials on websites where you have purchased any services or products. - Write articles or posts to submit to other websites, blogs, press and forums. *Pros in this solution:- No money. - Robust, stationary links. - Accepted by search engines.*Cons in this solution:- More time and efforts.- Two-way links (reciprocal links). - Difficult to determine the time to achieve goal.*References for this solution:- Link Exchange programs: linkalizer.com, linkmarket.net, freelinkcentral.com- Automatic link exchange programs: belinked.info, onewaytextlinks.com, build-reciprocal-links.com, linkdash.com - Quality Directories: businesspages.org, a2z-free.com, alphabiz.org- Article Directories: goarticles.com, articlealley.com, article99.com, ezinearticles.com *Tips:- You can find more sites for link exchange from studying your competitors' link popularity. Use search engines to perform this check, the keyword in many cases is: link:your_competitor_url.- When visiting some directories, pay attention to Directory category. You may find the others directories there. For example, in Directory category of businesspages.org, you can find some other good Australian directories.*Estimated time: 2 months2. Buying text links*Methods in this solution include:- Buy text links (backlinks) directly from sites (in case they don't accept link exchanges) - Buy text links from text link brokers. - Buy text links from link auction sites. - Pay fee to be included in big, quality directories (Yahoo, Overture, LookSmart...)*Pros in this solution:- Less time and efforts to get links. - One-way links (better than reciprocal links)*Cons in this solution- Money. We must pay fee every month (or year) for some links. - Buying text links (many in the same time) from text link brokers isn't encouraged by search engines. They can penalize us. - Some links are volatile (not permanent).*References for this solution:- Advertising on sites: iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker (PR5 - $10.00 per month) - Text link brokers: textlinkbrokers.com (5 Permanent Links PR0 – PR4: $175 /month), textlinkpopularity.com (10 Links from PR 3 Pages: $150 - Pay only once for permanent links - no recurring charges)- Link auction sites: linkadage.com- Big, quality directories: Yahoo! Directory (1 link - $299/year - your site will be reviewed first)*Tips:- When buying links from brokers, be sure that you can preview the pages in which your link will be included. Besides the PageRank, there are other factors to take into consideration such as: relevant links in this page, how many links in that page, whether your link is static, ... *Estimated time: 1 week (some directories need more time to review our request)3. Conclusion:It seems that the goal of 50 backlinks with PageRank greater than 2 for new websites is not an easy one. Improving link popularity is a long, patient but obligatory process. It's up to you to decide which solution is better or the combination of these two ones.
Article Source: http://www.superfeature.com
Article by Mike Pham of www.TopTrafficWholesaler.com . Internet advertising agency provides services that improve targeted traffic for clients' sites. Specializes in search engine submission and optimization as well as tools and resources useful for better ranking / positioning in search engines.