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10 SEO Benefits Of WordPress – How WordPress Can Help You With SEO

seoguy — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 15:20:15 +0000

I know I have already made couple of big posts about how to optimize your wordpress for SEO and of course it involved usage some plugins which comes really handy to accomplish what we want. Today I am not going to give out any tutorials regarding wordpress seo. I am just going to point out what are the SEO benefits which wordpress comes with, without the usage of any plugins or addons or whatsoever.

1. Permalinks:

First thing that comes to my mind about wordpress in terms of search engine optimization is the flexibility it provides with respect to url structure. You can alter the structure of permalinks to your liking and add keywords you want to focus on for each and every post you make. You should know that search engines even look in to the url when ranking webpages in its index.

2. Simple But Effective Default Theme:

WordPress now comes with a really attractive default theme. This theme is not only flexible but it also loads pretty fast and codings in this theme is very clean and search engine friendly. You should know that latest search engine from Google does take site speed in to consideration. So using default theme can help you to rank high in search results now

3. WordPress codes Are Clean:

Stable releases of wordpress always has clean codes, although latest version of wordpress does have some issues with memory limit. As far as I know the people who are involved in coding wordpress really know what they are doing and they are pretty good at it. So how does it help in terms of SEO? well if codes are clean blog pages displayed by wordpress is also clean, also uses less server resources that means your pages loads fast and overall site speed increases. This will not only enhance user experience it also makes the job of search bots a lot easier.

4. Usage Of Tags:

With wordpress you get the ability to tag your posts, it not only gives you an additional navigational option but also lets search bots to find your internal pages and posts more easily. WordPress also lets you to post your tags in your homepage which eases the process further for search engine spiders.

5. Categories:

You also get the ability to categorize your posts in wordpress. Which means you can use keywords in your category names and also wordpress gives you an option to alter the url slugs of category names, so you can use multiple versions of your keywords. Which is a good thing.

6. Easily optimize Images:

With insert image function you can easily upload the images and also optimize the images easily by adding alt and title tags, wordpress provides you with a feature that will let you to not only add title for your images but also you can add captions for each images. Search engines loves pics with all these information embedded in to image url and use them to index it on its image results.

7. Make Pages:

You can post pages in wordpress, meaning you can make pages for important keywords you want to focus on and have it on your navigation, Makes it easy for search engines to find your pages and rank it. You can take the wordpress seo page which you can find in the navigation for this blog. Also check where I rank for the term in Google

8. Make A Static Homepage:

You can write a detailed page with all the keywords you want to focus on in your homepage and make it static instead of displaying your recent posts in the homepage which keeps changing always. This will really help you with your rankings.

9. Ability To Comment On Posts And Pages For Users:

I cannot count how many times people have found my blog posts through the comments which my readers left on the blog. Blog comments does bring you a good deal of traffic especially when your blog gets popular. Also search engines give importance to posts with more comments in it.

10. Pinging Option:

You can easily ping your posts to various pinging services easily with wordpress. All you have to do is fill in the ping form with all the urls you need.

How To SEO WordPress With SEO Ultimate Plugin For WordPress

seoguy — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:31:12 +0000

Well I remember spending couple of days to prepare my first wordpress seo tutorial and I made it as exhaustive as possible to cover many aspects of search engine optimization you can achieve with wordpress. But to be frank I am kinda lazy person I myself do not implement all the things I covered in that tutorial. If you can do all that I have mentioned in the guide its well and good. What if you need a quick solution to seo your wordpress blog? is there a short way around? Well of course yes! That’s where this SEO Ultimate plugin comes in to play.

Most cases whenever people think about optimizing their wordpress blog for search engines the only plugin that comes in to their mind is all in one SEO plugin for wordpress and no wonder its the most popular SEO plugin there. On the other hand if you really need a plugin that will practically do all the things which all in one SEO plugin does with very little work then SEO ultimate plugin is something I would highly recommend. Why? you will know as we proceed through this tutorial.

If you want to follow through this guide then go ahead download and install SEO Ultimate plugin straight way.

So now you have installed the plugin lets go straight ahead on how we can use this plugin to better optimize our blog for search engines.

You should now notice a whole new array of options available to you in the wordpress admin panel with the lable SEO. just like the one the picture below.

So we will be using these features available to use through this plugin and lets see how we can do that.

1. Canonicalizer Avoid Duplicate Content Issues:

One of the main problem commonly faced by many bloggers is that their blog often getting penalized by search engines for hosting duplicate content and duplicate content doesn’t necessarily mean that you are copying your contents from somewhere else, they could be right within your site. For example when you add tags to your posts, your tag links redirects you to the same content as your post title links is it not? by default search engines consider them as seperate urls and index both this potentially increases the risk of duplicate content. Generating link rel = canonical tags will avoid such issues and tells search engines that they direct to the same content. This will let search engines to decide up on the best url it wants to index keeping you out of danger. To do so just choose canonicalizer and choose generate rel = canonical tags

2. Install Analytics And Other Tracking Codes:

Code inserter option lets you to insert the desired codes in to your blog, for example you can use it to insert the Google analytics code or if you are using any other tracking services you can use this place to insert those codes and it really does come handy and makes your job a lot more simples.

3. Comp researcher:

This option mainly lets you to use different search parameters you can use to analyze your competition in Google really quickly and easily. As far as I know there is no other plugin in wordpress which comes with this option. It should be really helpful to get a rough picture about your competition and with whom you are sharing your search results.

4.Deeplink Juggernaut:

I must say this is one of my favorite tools that comes with this plugin, if you have read my wordpress seo tutorial I was mentioning about the importance of internal links and how it could potentially affect your search rankings. With this tool your work to achieve best internal links is made possible. All you have to do is fill in the url and keyword you want that url to be linked to and update. Once your updates are done you should notice that whenever the term you have submitted here appears anywhere in your blog post it is automatically linked to the url you have mentioned here. Don’t you think that drastically reduces your work to edit each and every post to add the links to the keywords? also it improves the pagerank distribution across your site. So why not go ahead and fill in the urls and keywords you want to focus on? you can also control the maximum amount of links you want to appear on your posts through content link settings.

5. File Editor:

This option mainly helps to alter your robots.txt and .htaccess right from your admin panel. it sure does come handy rather than using your ftp to locate these files and editing it from there. This one is optional if you don’t want to use it its still fine.

6. Internal Relevance Researcher:

Again this tool can come handy when you want to search in Google for certain posts of yours with the keywords. I don’t want to put this one in detail again as its not something which you need to be bothered much in this context. So lets proceed to the next option.

7. Link Box Inserter:

This is something which I don’t use in this blog, but still I highly encourage to use this feature. What it does? it gives out the link to the post at the end of post or pages or where ever you want it to appear. Extremely helpful when people want to share your posts and pages somewhere else.

8. Meta Editor:

This option covers the important aspect of SEO, it lets you to add meta description about your blog and also to insert meta keywords. Though meta keywords are no more used by Google you can use it to focus on other search engines. Additionally it lets you to add verification codes for Google , yahoo and bing. Which is nice in my opinion.

9. More Link Customizer:

Helps you to optimize the read more links when you use more tags in your posts to avoid displaying the whole of your article in homepage. And you can optimize it to focus on the keywords you want in your more link, you can also add custom more keywords for each post using the seo settings which will be available for you under the post editor once you install this plugin.

10. No Index Manager:

No index manager mainly lets you not to prevent duplicate content by not allowing certain pages of your site to get in to index like tags pages, author archives etc.

11. sharing Facilitator:

Lets you to share your posts to social media sites by adding add this and share this button to your posts. This is something I really love to use on my blogs as it makes the job a lot easier to share your links and also build links in social media sites.

12. Slug Optimizer:

This option lets you to keep your url clean by removing unwanted words in your urls such as “in” “of” “for” etc. Eliminate the need for installing another plugin to do this job. I found it really helpful on many of my blogs.

13. Title Tag Rewriter:

Lets you to rewrite the title tags of posts, pages, tags etc very easily and all in one single area. You don’t have to go in search of codes in to your wordpress files. Again reduces lot more work for you and saves time.

14. SEO Settings:

This is something which really comes handy, this option which appears just below your post editor lets you to add meta titles, meta description, meta keywords, meta robots tag and more link text for every single post you make. Something which I love the most about this plugin. Use these areas sensibly and stand out of your competition.

How Do I Optimize My Blog?

seoguy — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:51:12 +0000

I got a question through my mail after a long time from a blogger Sheela from India asking me, she wants to know how do I optimize my blog? Its an interesting question which I would love to answer for my own personal feel good factor hehe.. Ok coming back to the question “how do I optimize my blog?”

To be frank I give more importance for on-page optimization over off-page, that doesn’t mean off-page optimization is not important. but my personal opinion is on-page optimization carries 60% of SEO over off-page, I know many seo-professionals and experts may not agree with me but its my personal opinion. Whenever I design a blog I focus more on my visitors and I design my blog based on it, I do analyze what are the age groups, their behavior patterns and other details about my visitors and decide up on my layout accordingly.

I make sure my pages loads faster, I use colors that are pleasing and relaxing for my users and goes easy on their eyes, I always prefer to have a white background with black font as its universally accepted and loved by many. In almost all of my blogs and also on some of my client blogs I make sure the content comes to the left corner because that’s where the user eyes tend to fall.

I am not a big fan of ads on blogs but I do need to monetize it in order to support my hosting costs and also I depend on my blogs for my income, I make sure I place ads on spots that don’t annoy my users, I avoid using video and image ads, I always prefer text ads as it proved to get me more clicks and also they don’t spoil your page layout much, also for some SEO reasons. I think internal linking plays a very great role in your rankings in search engines, I use SEO smart links by Vladimir prelovac, in fact I am a great fan of his works that I use almost all the plugin developed by him. You can check out more on what I do for on-page seo on my wordpress seo tutorial its a real big guide worth spending some time on for sure.

With regards to off-page optimization I love to comment on blogs, do-follow blogs especially, I hate RSS feed submissions but I do allow RSS for my subscribers, mostly I find people link to me naturally and I love it when they do, other than that I use seo elite software to look through links of my competitors and build links on those sites which they have links in, because search engines tend to analyze your site’s relevancy based on your links, so if you have links on pages where your competitors are then it sure does influence your rankings in a great way. Other than that I do make up contents sometimes in order to go viral and gather more links for me, I tend to submit them in social media sites like digg.

I do a lot of other things occasionally on my blogs, I cannot discuss everything, I try to reveal things more frequently on this blog as I update it with more interesting articles.

Speed up Your WordPress Blog With Two Simple Tricks

seoguy — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:18:20 +0000

I am going to update this tricks on the next update of wordpress SEO which is most likely to happen with in next couple of days as I review the different sections of the tutorial and make updates on them. But for now I am giving out these tricks which might help you a little.

1. Enabling Web Server Compression:
Enabling web server compression will reduce the size of your pages by compressing them, this will help you a lot with faster page loads, load on the server, also search bots will find it helpful to crawl through pages with reduced file size, it increases the over all site performance and user experience. To enable this compression all you need to do is create a php.ini file in your server root and include these lines in it.

zlib.output_compression=on

if you already have php.ini just include these lines in to it at first or at the end.

Use Wp-cache:
I recommend using wp-cache over wp-supercache for a simple reason, I really didn’t find much of a difference with both, although if you find noticeable difference with both I would say its worth to stick with wp-cache because supercache proved to be little buggy or problematic when you move your blog to some other location or while selling your blog or if you want to uninstall the plugin. I have noticed using wp-cache with web server compression enabled has increased the blog loading speed to a great extent which is more than enough than loading a script or plugin on your blog which can be little buggy and troublesome at times.

How To Prevent Content Theft From Your WordPress Blog

seoguy — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:34:34 +0000

Content theft is one of the biggest problems faced by many webmasters nowadays, some claim that content theft is not something to be worried about as search engines tend to give the original content more value over others, but still there are some occasions where I found duplicate contents rank high over original contents, especially the site which duplicated your content has high PR and old domain name, there are also cases where people tend to steal your pics and its url and use it on their site which might very well play a role on your over all bandwidth. So in order to avoid these consequences its better to safe ground your blog against content theft and there are simple ways with which you can achieve this.

1. Disabling Indexing Of your Images in Robots.txt:
This is something that is totally left to you, some people argue that people who do image search are the ones who want to steal your images, but there are people who feel happy that people visit their site through image search feature in various search engines. so if you prefer not to index your images or you don’t want people to steal your images from search engines then its advisable to block search bots from indexing your images by giving some special instructions in robots.txt file. You can prevent indexing of images by including these following instructions in your robots.txt

To Disallow indexing of gif files
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.gif$

To Disallow indexing of jpg files
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.jpg$

To Disallow indexing of png files
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.png$

2. Get Your RSS Feeds To Display Only Excerpts:
RSS feeds are often prone to abuse, I really don’t like to give out my RSS feeds to directories and other sources as they tend to use my site’s content and drive traffic using it and also they tend rank high over me for my own contents, I don’t really recommend using RSS feed directories as a way to build links to your site and there are tons of other ways available to build effective links over RSS submissions in my opinion. You can make your feeds to give out only part of the content in wordpress easily by changing your
Settings —-> Reading Settings
and by changing the each article in the feed to display only summary.

Update: As Jonathan pointed out in the comment below, fairshare.cc can be a good alternative rather than pointing your feeds to display summary which proved to have frustrated some users.
3. Block Yahoo Pipes In Robots.txt :
Using yahoo pipes has emerged to be one of the most popular ways to steal contents on sites, but fortunately you can effectively prevent yahoo pipes from stealing your content through robots.txt by including following lines in your robots.txt

User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0 Disallow: / User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 2.0 Disallow: /

4. Disabling Text Selection And Right Click:
I have seen many blogs do have this function enabled where they don’t allow their users to select and copy the text, also they don’t allow right click in on their pages, this effectively reduces manual content theft, although some people tend to look at the source code to take the content and page info in firefox to get the image location, but these are exceptional cases which you should not worry much about as you cannot do anything about these cases. There is a plugin called blog protector which helps you to achieve this. Check the link below for plugin.

Update: This option again is a personal choice of webmasters.

Link To Blog Protector Plugin

5. Use PictPocket Plugin To Spot Hot-linked Images:
Pickpocket Plugin does a fairly good job in locating image files that are being stolen from your site along with your url and being used on other sites.

Download Pictpocket plugin

Simple Themes Don’t Mean They Are SEO Friendly

seoguy — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:02:16 +0000

There is a misunderstanding among many bloggers that, when they choose a simple and elegant looking theme, they think its a SEO friendly theme, but it may not be necessarily true because of some reasons. Here are something you need to know why simple themes doesn’t mean they are SEO friendly.

1. Simple and elegant looking themes may also use large number of images in its design. You need keep an eye on them, because themes which uses large number of images for its layout takes longer time to load, that potentially reduces the site speed.

2. Themes that use java scripts and flash in its design might well look elegant and simple too, but they are not really as search engine friendly as you might think.

3. I remember this comment from Sarojini Naidu of India about Mahatma Gandhi that “To keep Mahatma Gandhi poor, we have to destroy treasures. His poverty is very costly.” I can relate it directly to some simple looking themes of wordpress, because to make the theme look simple they make a loads and loads of coding.

4. Big CSS files also reduces site speed to some extent, usually themes that uses a lot of decoration here and there, tend to take a lot of CSS coding to give some attractive look to pages, but this sometimes increases the size of styles sheets which might play a little role in reducing the site’s speed.

5. Themes that uses multiple style sheets are also not that advisable, one of the drawbacks of most popular thesis theme is that, but they don’t play a big role in reducing your site speed but still I give more weight to a theme that uses single style sheet, with a simple design elements.

4 Tips On How To Distribute Keywords In Your Blog Post

seoguy — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:13:29 +0000

Unless you use the actual terms you want to rank for in your blog posts and description areas, there is less chance that you will start to show up in search engines for those terms, unless you have an extra ordinary amount of back links that is linking to you for that term.

Lets be more practical and we know for sure that chances are less that you will get millions on people to link to you with the term that is actually not present in your blog anywhere, So it becomes more necessary that you should be using the keywords in your blog post for which you want search engines to show up your pages in their results. Here are some of the ways which you can try to distribute your keywords across your blog post and other areas that relates to your blog post so that you might actually show up for the search term.

1. Try to find terms that means the same:
Like if you want to write a review about a mobile phone, you can use other terms instead of just using mobile phone again and again like cell phone, smart phone, handset etc.. that way you can avoid the problem of search engines penalizing your page for keyword stuffing. Plus don’t stuff keywords in your blog posts, its a real bad idea and not only search engines hates that, even you visitors will get fed up with it.

2. Use Keywords In Your Titles:
Don’t just use your keywords in the blog post, also make sure to include it in your titles as well. In fact I would say its a must that you use your keywords in titles. Reason is titles are the first thing that people will notice before they actually click on your link in search engines. So its a must that you use keywords in titles that people will search for.

3. Try To Use Similar Keyword Term In URL:
Wordpress has an option where you can alter your URL structure, instead of using the same keyword in the URL that you have used in the title, you can use a similar term in the url structure, that way you will get a chance to rank for both terms that will potentially increase your search traffic.

4. Use Keywords In Meta Descriptions:
I know many of you are lazy to fill the meta description field, most bloggers are tend to be lazy to fill in that meta description area, but just know that’s where you need to take advantage over your competition, you need to do things which your competitors feel lazy to do. When you do that you stand out and start to rank high. So just don’t feel lazy to fill out meta descriptions, try to write a sensible meta description that will include the term you want to rank for.

Setting Up Your Pinging List In Your WordPress Blog

seoguy — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:48:08 +0000

Pinging services are useful in informing search engines and other sources that you have updated your blog. Fortunately wordpress comes with an excellent system that does the work for you automatically all you need to do is just make an initial setup and you can just go about updating your blog. Every time you update your blog with new post wordpress automatically pings these search engines and other services notifying them that you have updated you blog and request them to come and check it out.

Here is how you can set up your pinging service.

Go to your writing services under settings option. And by default you will have wordpress pinging to pingomatic, but you can add other services and update the list. Here is the list of services I use.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/


http://1470.net/api/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
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://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

6 Tips On How To Speed Up Your Blog

seoguy — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:09:06 +0000

You might have known it already that site’s speed might well be soon taken in to consideration for ranking websites as the new Google search engine starts to unfold by 2010.

So just don’t be left out of the competition here are some tips to help you as a blogger to make your blog faster and smoother.

1. Try to use templates that uses less number of images in its design, I have seen a lot of templates that uses more number of images to decorate many parts in your templates, they might well look good but when it comes to site’s loading speed these images might well stand on the way of your site speed.

2. When you are using images and pictures for your post, make sure those pictures are hosted some where else. Hosting your images on photobucket is an excellent option, no matter where ever you are storing your images make sure you are storing it on a reliable location. This reduces considerable amount of load on your server and also reduces the bandwidth usage, not to mention it increases your page load speed for sure.

3. Just try to avoid flash templates like a plague in your blogs, some flash templates gives out some weird loading screen which will not only drive your visitors away but also reduces the loading speed of your site to a large extent. Say no to flash templates.

4. Try to single CSS file for your blog design, there are many blog templates that uses multiple CSS file for its design, if possible try to combine all these CSS files in to a single file that will considerably increase your page load speed.

5. Try to use WP-Cache and WP-Supercache plugins for your wordpress blogs, as they tend to store your cached pages in a single location, which will be displayed to the user which not only creases the page load speed but also it prevents the server from executing php codes to display the page to the users that considerably reduces the bandwidth usage too.

6. Use Firebug plugin for firefox browsers to analyze your page speed and also to get suggestions on reducing your amount of javascript in your pages and also reducing the size of CSS files.

Also try to get a good hosting service out there, cheap hosting service might not always be a good option when you take in site speed in to consideration.

5 Tips For Writing Better Articles For SEO

seoguy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:20:42 +0000

1. First thing we must understand while writing articles is that it may fall under two different categories, one is writing for search engines and other is writing for your visitors. So which one is better? I would say your article should have a bit of both, you must make sure you are not flooding down your keyword your are focusing on a particular article so that it chases your visitors away frustrated and also its not good from SEO point of view either, So just write great contents that gets the readers interested with the right blend of keywords.

2. Right focus on your keywords is essential when you write your articles, you cannot write an article that doesn’t even have a single instance of the keyword you are focusing on and expect it to rank high.

3. Shedding more light on keyword density, just make sure that you are not over using the keywords in your articles and make the whole article look senseless for the readers, you must maintain your keyword density to such a level that your article makes sense to your readers and also doesn’t look like you are spamming your articles for search engines.

4. Expressing what you really want to express is a must, just don’t compromise your goal for the sake of search rankings.

5. Link to other similar articles in your blog whenever possible which you think that might help your readers, this will not only increase your internal links but also help people to stay on your blog for longer period which will eventually reduce your bounce rate.