Wordpress is a powerful content management system and certainly makes it easy to manage lots of content with less effort. It is not perfect however. So you need to do some tweaking to get your posts optimized for search engines. Of course, you need to think about getting links to your blog as well. With that in mind, here are 10 ways you can optimize your blog posts for SEO:

1. Competitive Analysis: make sure you go after keywords and topics that are not too competitive. At some point, banging your head against other heavyweights in a niche becomes less than ideal. There are plenty of keyword research tools, analytics, and competitive intelligence tools that you can use to optimize your keyword lists and go after the ones that are worth your effort.
2. Title Tags: the most important ranking factor, even in 2010. You want to make sure your titles are optimized and target “one” main keyword per page. It’s OK to let your pages compete for spots, but if you want to get the best results, you are better off focusing on one main keyword phrase per page. Use plugins such as All In One SEO to make the process easier.
3. Page URL: I can tell you from experience that using keywords in your domain or page URL can help make a big difference. Have you ever noticed those under construction blogs that are ranking high on Google due to the keywords used in their domain names?
4. Header Tags: using your keywords in your header tag makes a difference as well. You do want to watch the number of times you use your keyword on your pages, but if there is one place that you should use your keywords in, it should be your header tags.
5. Alt Tags: not as important as they used to be, but it still is a best practice to provide alt tags for all your images. You don’t want to spam the search engines here, so don’t put all your hopes in your alt tags.
6. Internal Links: link to your other content on your blog and link often. Using keywords in your anchor text does help a lot as well. If you are using Wordpress, there are plenty of scripts you can install on your blog to automatically link to your other stories on your blog.
7. Image Name & Caption: image names (and to be more general file names) and caption can provide you with another opportunity to let search engines know more about your pages and what they are all about.
8. Outbound Links: don’t hesitate to no follow links to websites that you are not too sure about. In fact, I would remove links to websites I don’t feel comfortable linking to. But do link to top blogs or sites in your niche. It never hurts.
9. Social Media Buttons: another great way to get people to your blog and get links to your content is by adding social media buttons to your blog. Fixed Social Buttons is a decent plugin if you are looking for something attractive.
10. Viral Link building: you need to be a bit creative here. Whether it’s throwing a giveaway on a hot gadget (e.g. iPad) or writing a controversial post, the formula for viral marketing is out there. Just be creative.

These are not everything you can do to optimize your posts for search engines, but they do help a lot. You don’t want to over-optimize your pages. At some point, you are better off working on quality content than changing the smallest details in your posts.

Those of you who have been around the field of SEO have probably seen the rise and fall of blog spamming. There was a time when people would go to other people’s blogs and get Yes-Follow links back all the time. In fact, a few online marketers were touting this as a must-do technique to get high rankings on Google and other top website. If you managed to get your comments on highly popular blogs, you can almost guarantee yourself a decent stream of traffic for a while. Those days have come and gone, and people are still spamming blogs for traffic and attention. And they are not getting any smarter.

Spammers know that bloggers have become more alert about the challenge of spam comments. That’s why they are changing their comments to make them look as if they are legitimate. Take a look at the following:

I have recently changed browsers from Chrome to Microsoft IE 6. After the change I seem to have a problem with loading JavaScript. Every-time I go on a site that requires Javascript, my computer doesn’t load…

As you can tell, the message is designed to encourage bloggers to allow it to go on. But when you get the same message over multiple blogs, you know you are dealing with a spammer who’s using a dumb strategy. There are plenty of ways bloggers and website owners can combat spammers. You can always no follow all comments and their URLs on your website. If you run Wordpress, that’s already been done for you. But that’s not merely enough. You also want to give services such as reCaptcha a try.

You can also use services such as Disqus to get around the issue and manage your comments more effectively. Spam comments may not look like a big challenge for your blog. But when your blog starts picking up traffic, you are going to get a ton of spammers making their way to your blog. You certainly want to be ready to handle them. Spam can damage your brand and even put too much load on your servers. So don’t underestimate the issue if you want to continue dominating search engine rankings.

If you are looking to get yourself trained in the art of search engine optimization, you should look at these 4 SEO training programs:

SEOmoz: I mostly use this service for its tools, but there is plenty of training material available with this program as well. The good part of this training course is that you learn the fundamentals and get a real sense of what SEO is all about, especially by using their tools.

SEOBook: still one of the best SEO training courses on the market. Aaron Wall made quite a name for himself when he launched SEOBook a while back. Fast forward to today, and the course includes a wealth of information on search engines.

Bruce Clay Inc: Bruce Clay’s website is one that I recommend to anyone interested in the field of SEO. There are plenty of things you can learn from his website. His main training class is not cheap, but you get hands on experience with SEO.

30DC+: this is a unique course that will bring you up to date with everything social media and online marketing. It’s essential for SEOs to understand what’s going on in these areas. Sites such as YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter all provide great opportunities for SEOs. Think of this as a crash course in all these not-so-new services.

Feel free to share your favorite SEO training courses below.

Wordpress is one of the most powerful content management systems on the Internet. There used to be a time when people looked at Wordpress as a fun platform but not something one would use for a serious portal. That has changed dramatically with all the changes that the platform has gone through in the past few years. Nowadays, many top portals are taking advantage of Wordpress. And I have to say those plugins are very addictive to play with.

Wordpress may be a powerful content management system, but it is not going to get you to the top of the search engines all by itself. A lot will depend on your content, your keywords, and the optimizations you have done on your website. If you have been a student of SEO, you probably know the basic on-page, off page optimization tactics that you can take advantage of to give your website a better chance at ranking high on Google. What you dont’ want to do is forget about all those plugins that you are installing on your blog.

There are all kinds of plugins available for Wordpress. Some don’t add any outgoing link to your blog. But you want to be careful with some of those that do. It’s always nice to link back to the official site of a plugin and give something back to the authors and developers. But you want to make sure the sites you are linking to are worth linking to. What if the author of your plugin is running a link farm or dubious website? Trust me, that approach has been tried in the past. Spammers know how to get the attention of bloggers. Spending a few bucks on developing a plugin that will link out without you knowing it could be an easy way to generate thousands of links to a blog or website.

Sometimes, it’s not tough to figure out whether you are dealing with a spam website, but you can always run a few test to figure out whether you are linking to a decent page. For starters, you want to make sure the pages you are linking are indexed by Google and other search engines. From my experience, you want to try the top 3 engines as sometimes one or two lag behind the other one(s). You also want to use tools such as Compete, SpyFu, SEOmoz to figure out what the site you want to link to is up to. When in doubt, you want to no-follow your link (by hand or using plugins such as Robot Meta) just to stay on the safe side.

I am all for giving credit to plugin and theme developers for Wordpress. However, some of these folks bank on you not paying too much attention to what you have installed on your blog. Security issues aside, you absolutely don’t want to link to a dubious website, or your ranking could tank like a heavy piece of rock thrown in the water.

When you start a business online, you may not have the money to pay $200 to $1000 a month to host your website. You may not even need to. But if you are serious about what you are doing, your website is going to grow. That means, sooner rather than later you are going to be in a position where you will have to increase the amount of money you spend on your web host. Not only that, you are going to need  a web host that provides you with proper support when you are in trouble.

So why choosing the right web host matters to your SEO efforts? Simple. If your website is slow or down when Google and other search engines’ crawlers come to visit, you may get penalized and even drop a few places in the rankings. With Google paying more attention to the speed of your website, things are only going to get worse for those SEOs that want to run their business super cheap and avoid paying too much money for hosting.

Unfortunately, finding a good web host is not easy these days. You certainly want to look at BBB ratings. At the same time, you want to look at what other people have said about the web host you are planning to partner with. There are too many affiliates out there who will tell you everything you need to hear just to get you signed up for a web host. Make sure you do your research and search for the words “scam” or “complaints” next to the name of web hosts to figure out whether people are saying negative things about them. It’s not a foolproof process, but it can help you sign up for a better quality web host. Remember, cheap hosting doesn’t mean good hosting.

You certainly don’t want to copy everything your competitors are doing, but you’d be surprised how much you can learn from studying your competitors’ work. If you are looking to take your SEO game to the next level and beat your competitors in their own game, here are 4 powerful keyword spy SEO tools worth looking at:

SpyFu: one of the most underrated tools on the market. I have seen many talk about this tool, but most people focus on tools such as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery instead of spending some time with this tool. SpyFu gives you access to plenty of tools you can use to spy on your competitors’ organic or paid campaigns.

Compete: Compete is for power players. The information that you get from this service is top notch and can go a long way towards helping you respond to your competitors and match them move by move. Great way to compete your traffic metrics with those of your competitors.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spying tools on the market. If you intend to promote affiliate products on your site or just want to find out what keywords people are bidding on, this tool comes in handy. It can also come in handy when you are ready to expand your keyword set.

KeyCompete: another interesting competitive intelligence tool that not only lets you dig up your competitors’ keywords, but it lets you spy on their paid advertising campaigns as well. Useful for long-tail keywords as well.

What’s your favorite SEO spying tool?

In addition, as of February 1, 2010 we will no longer pay referral fees on purchases made by customers who are referred to http://www.amazon.co.uk or http://www.javari.co.uk via Free Search Results. Free Search Results are links containing an Associate’s tag displayed in a search engine’s free, natural, or organic search results in response to a search query which send customers directly to an Amazon site without the customer first being sent to an Associate’s site and the customer clicking on a link to arrive at the Amazon site.

These changes do not prohibit you from purchasing paid search advertisements or submitting links to search engines so long as the links that appear on the search engines send customers to your site.

That of course doesn’t mean that you can’t make money by optimizing your website for search engines and get ranked that way. In some ways it’s understandable for Amazon taking such an action. There are plenty of SEO experts who can get their links up high in the rankings and make money that way. Amazon wants to reduce consumer confusion by making you take people to your own site before bringing them to Amazon.

Having said that, I don’t believe Amazon disregarding affiliate sales generated through free search is such a good idea. First of all, there are many ways affiliate could feel left out by such a policy. And that’s assuming that Amazon is actually capable of tracking all the sales generated through free search results. I am not even sure if it’s good for business. Think about it. Affiliates may be making money off of Amazon, but they do help bring in customers as well. This move to reduce affiliate payments doesn’t bode well on Amazon’s image.

Affiliate marketing is still going strong, but I have to admit the industry could be on its last legs as economy continues to struggle. Our lawmakers are still talking about the possibility of introducing more taxes (possibly Internet tax) all around the nation. So far the idea has not been successful. The FTC is expected to start cracking down on some affiliates as well. Things are certainly not looking good for affiliates who haven’t mastered the game.

Search engine optimization has got quite a reputation among those who don’t know what the business is all about. Some consider SEO as a form of hacking. Others consider search engine professionals as snake oil salesmen. Of course, there are a few people that consider search engine optimization a bad thing for the whole web experience. A lot of bad reputation that search engine optimization has gotten in the past few years is due to SEOs being more obsessed about traffic than improving the experience of web searchers. There are many people that spend more time stuffing keyword, changing their copy to include more keywords that make sense, and even add more text elements to each page to get better rankings in the SERPs. I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t focus on on-page and off-page optimization tactics, but as a SEO, one needs to know why they go about implementing a certain strategy. Your audience may not care about minor changes to your website or a few extra keywords here or there, but it’s tough to know where the boundaries are.

It’s true that search engine optimizers are hired to help websites climb up the rankings and get more free traffic. But if you haven’t spent time to optimize your site to make things more convenient for your readers, you are missing the boat. And I am not talking about adding breadcrumbs or other forms of navigation to your website. It’s about providing value to your readers and giving them what they need. I can’t tell you how many times I have found a page on the first page of Google only to realize it offers no real value other than a page with a bunch of keywords on it. That’s not what the search is about.

Everyday thousands of new websites make their way to the Web. But only a few of them actually provide real value to their visitors. I would say the 1 – 99 rule applies here. In essence, less than 1% of websites on the web are responsible for 99% of fresh, valuable content on the Internet. This is of course a subjective number, but there are a ton of people who make a living by writing useless copy and slapping them on their pages. Of course, these folks are good at spamming blogs (to gain backlinks) and go out of their way to get their pages climb search engine rankings. But is that really helping the visitors’ experience on the World Wide Web?

SEO is all about providing more value to your visitors, in essence helping them find what they need on your website. But in order to do that, you need to have SOMETHING on your website. Just copying what others are writing on their websites or slapping press releases on your site does not exactly enhance the overall web experience for your visitors. You may get away with ranking high on Google. You may even make a killing with Google Adsense. But if you are not providing value with your content and don’t mind stealing other people’s content for your own gains, you are not exactly doing the field of SEO any favor. Parasitic business models are one of the reasons the World Wide Web is such a mess. Ethical SEOs are hoping to change all that.

I have to admit. Search engine optimization is a bit of gaming when you think about it. Many SEOs want to admit that SEO is either an art or a science. But it’s a little bit of both. Nevertheless, the whole field is built upon the fact that SEO professionals can test and figure out what search engines like and give that to them. There isn’t anything malicious behind what most white hat SEOs do but let’s call a spade a spade. The word optimize is closer to the word gaming than most SEOs want to admit.

Every aspiring SEO wants to know how is it exactly that search engines go about ranking search results. Is it the number of links you have or maybe the type of links you are getting to your site. Could it be your domain name or the location of your server? There are hundreds of factors considered in a modern search algorithm. While none of the algorithms out there today are perfect, they do the best possible to provide folks like you and I with the most relevant results. Google and other search engines may be moving towards personalized and real-time search, but SEOs are not going to give up trying to figure out search engines’ algorithms and dominating them.

Twitter seems to be the next battleground for SEOs. As search engines try to index and rank tweets, it has given SEOs another opportunity to game the system and get their own tweets at the top of the results. This process can be more difficult as building a real following on Twitter can take a bit of time. But search engine optimization experts (black hat and white hat) don’t ever let such challenges to scare them away.

There are plenty of ways to gain a lot of followers on Twitter. Services such as TweetAdder are being used by black hat and white hat tweeters to follow and gain followers on the fly. You can also try advanced Twitter tools that are out there to figure out who is more likely to follow you if you follow them. So the gaming is definitely going on in this space. Believe it or not, Google actually does use an algoirthm to rank tweets. That means there is always going to be people who want to figure out how to take advantage of these factors to get their own tweets to the top of the results. In this space, it’s hard to predict what could happen to Twitter or Facebook in a few years. But for now, Twitter is here to stay, so we all better get used to it. As far as the gaming part goes, it’s not like anything we haven’t seen before.

There are plenty of places to look for new keywords. I have talked about top keyword tools that allow you to dig up keyword ideas fast. But you don’t have to spend money to dig up new keyword ideas. There are plenty of places you can look at to find out what people are searching for and how you can take advantage of that. Here are 5 places that are worth exploring:

Twitter: Twitter is a goldmine of data for those who know how to take advantage of it. Going through Twitter trends is just one way to figure out what people are searching for. TweetVolume and Twendz are both great tools to help you keep track of keywords on Twitter.

Facebook: there are plenty of people who spend hours on a daily basis on Facebook. That means more data to look at for you and I. Facebook Lexicon is a great place to tap into this goldmine.

eBay Pulse: if you own an online shop or just want to optimize your affiliate website to add products that people buy frequently, eBay Pulse is worth looking at.

Google Wonderwheel: if you are planning to expand your keyword horizons, it can’t get any easier than using Google Wonderwheel. It’s free and pretty fun to play with.

Wordpress.com Tags: Wordpress.com hosts thousands of blogs online. These blogs are across hundreds of niches. Going through Wordpress.com tags can give you a good idea what people are talking about, and how you can take advantage of it.

There you have it. 5 very useful tools to dig up new keyword ideas, and they are all free. Can’t get better than that.