So you want to get more traffic to your Wordpress blog? One way to do that is by optimizing each and every post for your blog. Your content always going to be play a big role on how your visitors perceive your website and your business as a whole. However, if you have spent a lot of time developing killer content for your blog, you want to make sure you put the effort forward to optimize your posts to get more exposure for your blog. When optimizing your pages, you want to focus on both on-page and off-page tactics. There is so much you can achieve by playing with your website’s code. In order to dominate the search, you need both on-page and off-page optimization.

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. (more…)

2009 is finally over, and it has been one busy year in the field of search engine optimization. We are no longer in the predictable era of search engine optimization. Google, Bing, and other top search engines are jumping on the latest trends and changing the way we all search. Personalized Search is going to be the big thing in 2010, so will be mobile, local, and real-time search. If you are a business owner who have no idea about SEO, the sooner you start the better.

A lot of people assume that it’s too late to catch up as many have already optimized their websites for the search engines. That can’t be further from the truth. There are a lot of people who don’t even implement the most basic search engine optimization tactics, and those who do often give up before seeing any tangible results. If you are looking to enhance your website’s reach in 2010, here are 10 simple tactics you should implement in the new year:

1. Listen: if you want to create high quality content, you need to keep your ears more open than ever before. There are plenty of new channels that you can take advantage of to gather valuable information about your post, but you have to keep listening to what people have to say about your products and brands in your niche, and more importantly things people say about you and your business.
2. Keywords: there is never a bad time to expand your keyword set and target new phrases. Targeting long-tail keywords and phrases that you have not targeted yet is a good way to start the new year.
3. Title: I can’t tell you how many times I see people who talk about search engine optimization but still have not taken time to optimize their title tags. It’s the no-brainer move of the next year if you haven’t already optimized your title tags.
4. Link building: links do matter. The more relevant, quality links you get to your pages, the better chance you have of getting your pages ranked high on top search engines. Search engine algorithms differ on how they treat incoming links, but in general if your content is good enough for people to link to, you are on the right track. (more…)

Throwing big words around is often used by consultants to justify the big bucks that they are getting. Let’s say you have a meeting with a client, and you start throwing around acronyms and big words. There is a good chance that you can impress the individual if they are simple enough to get impressed by big words. KEI is one of those words that has been thrown around in the past. It’s true that more folks now know what KEI means, but it’s stil a big word for SEO newbies.

There are many definitions for KEI, but Wordtracker has the best definition for it:

The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

Credit to WordTracker for providing KEI for their keywords, but everybody does that now. KEI does look effective on the surface as you can find terms that are less competitive and easy to rank for. The problem is that KEI does not factor in the quality of each search term. For instance, KEI cannot predict if your keyword attracts shoppers, information seekers, or buyers. If you are in business to make a living, you want to convert folks to buyers, but KEI has no way of determining that.

KEI also does not take into account the quality of competition. You might find a keyword that looks effective according to KEI, but if you have 30 Yahoo’s or Google’s in that niche, you pretty much have not much of a chance for getting ranked in the top 30.

In essence, KEI is not a credible metric on its own. It can be helpful if you do your research to figure out the quality of keywords but by its own KEI is just a big empty word. Now, I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t use it. It’s just that it is not accurate enough to build an entire SEO campaign based on KEI numbers, unless you don’t like your job.

That’s the claim many have made in the past, and it is interesting to look at. An orphan page is one that is not linked from any other page from your site. That pretty much makes it difficult for search engine robots to navigate through those pages. Search engine robots are not that smart to find your pages without a link. Having said that, if someone finds your page and puts a link to it, there is a good chance that it will be found.

Orphan pages do not hurt your search engine rankings but do not help it either. In fact, by having orphan pages you do not get the best out of each and every page on your site. Your goal should be to create theme-based websites to get ranked well on Google, and in order to do that, you need to do some serious inter-linking. So, do search engine penalize you for having Orphan pages? Not really! Should you do better and actually fix these pages? You betcha!

If you have been reading SEO news lately, you have probably heard webmasters complaining about getting penalized for duplicate content. Search engines do frown upon duplicate content. The reason is, it is a short-cut to add content to your site, and it adds no value for the searcher. But how serious is the penalty for having duplicate content?

No one can say for sure. Some experts claim that you won’t be penalized but you won’t also get any benefit out of these duplicate pages. Some others believe that you may end up in the supplementary index if your content is deemed to be duplicate. I personally believe that the nature of your content determines where you will end up.

I have seen folks getting their sites ranked high on Google by using articles from e-zinearticles. The key here is to use articles that are not reused by other members. These benefits will be short-term if others also join you in putting those articles online. But the most serious offense is done by content scrapers. If you run a scraper bot on top sites to create a site of your own, you risk getting kicked out of the search engines. I personally have been a victim of content scrapers stealing my content. But none of these sites actually have shown up the SERPs.

Duplicate content on blogs is another issue that SEO professionals have to deal with these days. The truth is, it’s better to change the robots.txt file to make sure only one content URL is crawled by engines. But I wouldn’t worry about this issue very much as search engines have gotten smarter, and they do not penalize for having two different URL structures for the same content (but you should take care of it regardless in case they change their mind!).

The best practice here is to write original content. If you have access to PLR articles, you may want to significantly change them to make them unique to search engines. Duplicate content can limit your presence on search engines if used the wrong way, so you should make sure you add plenty of fresh content to your site to negate the effect of any of your duplicate articles.

One of the most interesting aspects of SEO industry is the fact that there are so many self-proclaimed experts who claim to know everything about search engines. Some of the consultants swear on their parents’ graves about the effectiveness of some of their techniques. Now here is the thing. Nobody knows for sure what works and what doesn’t on major search engines, including Google. We can all provide a best guess based on what we have seen work on search engines. I personally have had a lot of success getting ranked by tweaking my title tags, but I wouldn’t come out and say that title tags are the only factor you should work on.

Optimizing with Google means spending a lot of hours in SEO forums and in front of computer. Things change quickly and rankings fluctuate with Google. But two things have stayed the same in the past few years:

• It’s all about content: it’s all about content. Content is still king. If you have good solid content, people will link to you and search engines will love you. But if you keep putting up junk articles on your sites, there is a good chance that you won’t achieve consistent success on Google. Most sites that are getting ranked high on Google have magnetic content that is refreshed with even better content on a consistent basis.
• It’s all about links: have you wondered why people get ranked for a search term that they have not used in their text body or in their title tags? It’s simple. It’s the incoming anchor text that is responsible for that. If you don’t have the keyword phrase anywhere on your page nor in your domain name, then how can you explain getting ranked for a search phrase?

At the end of the day, you should spend most of your time on content and link building activities. Working on other factors is important too, but don’t spend too much time doing it.

Search engine optimization is now being used by more companies to take advantage of the so-called “free traffic” on search engines. So the obvious general terms are becoming super competitive. It’s not to say that you can’t get ranked for broad terms, but the conversion won’t be that great even if you manage to rank well for a broad term such as “laptop.”

But what most people forget about is the long tail of search. Think about it. If you are optimizing for a specific model number you can get a whole lot of traffic that is more targeted. At the end of the day, SEO shouldn’t be about ranking but about profit in my opinion. If you are getting a million people to your site but are not making much profit, then your traffic is useless. You either have to find the way to convert that traffic or you better focus on terms that do convert.

Optimizing for more specific terms such as “brand + model” or SKU numbers can be huge for your SEO efforts. Sure. It will be boring to create extra pages just for SKUs and models, but it will be worth it.

Let’s say you pick up a book about search engine optimization and read it from cover to cover. You probably read about a lot techniques that don’t work, and those that do work are not easy to implement. One of these techniques that you are surely going to read about in any book is the concept of creating linkbaits to get incremental links to your website. While linkbaiting is very pleasing to the ear and we all want to read more about, implementing a successful linkbaiting campaign can be very difficult.

The gurus tell you that you should focus on How-tos or reports with pretty graphs on them, but I can tell you from the experience that nothing sell like contorversy. But if you add my secret ingredient, outside-the-box, to controversy, you can get a whole lot of links and attention on the web. Now here is where I go and take credit for coming up with this method, but the truth is I found out how powerful it is when I read a story about a wild solution to stop illegal immigration in the U.S.

It’s a very simple concept. If you talk about controversial things, you either get to offend a few people, or rose the interest of those who are bored with their daily dose of news. Add the wild idea to the mix, and you are going to get people who are in the middle and want to show they are smarter than you or they see flaws in your approach. If you follow search engine optimization books, you end up taking approaches that have been done before, and that doesn’t set you apart in your market, now does it? Controversy sells! Whether we like it or not.

Blogging is very hot these days. Almost everyone I know has a blog and of course has something to say about something. There are of course multiple blog platforms that offer different features and use different coding structures. It is true that search engines love blogs and forms due to the freshness of content on these items, but also due to SE-friendly struture of some of these blogging web application packages.

While Blogger, ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox are all good blogging platforms, Wordpress is truly the superstar of the show. Wordpress is an almost perfect platform for those of us who want to have the best blogging features plus the freedom to make changes as we wish (I am talking about a self-hosted Wordpress blog here). But due to its dynamic structure, Wordpress blogs are barely optimized for search engines from the very first day, so I thought I share 5 quick things that I have personally done for my own Wordpress Weblogs.

1. Post titles, post titles, post titles: Title tags are one of the most important factors that search engines consider when evaluating your pages. Having the right title tag with keywords that you intend on targeting can make a world of difference. I would put more than my title post as my title tag just to have the opportunity to properly optimize each and every post for search engines. You can either write the PHP code yourself or use a plugin such as SEO Title Tag from netconcepts.

2. URLs: Post URLs are also important for your search engine efforts. Wordpress does not optimize your URLs for you, at least not right from the start. So make sure you optimize your Permalinks using Wordpress’ interface. You can use something like /%category%/%postname% for your Permalinks (go to Settings menu and click on Permalinks).

3. 301 Redirects: you want to make sure that you take care of broken links and 301 redirect them to the right location. You can easily do so with the Redirection plugin for Wordpress.

4. No follow Links: You want to make sure that you are not leaking Pagerank by links that are posted in your comments. In addition, links to META pages can also be no followed to increase your link weight. You can take care of this using All-in-One SEO pack.

5. Finally, make sure you have the right robots.txt for your blog. While many SEO professionals discount robots.txt as an effective SEO optimization technique, it is still important for you to make sure that you avoid content duplication issues on Wordpress. For instance, http://www.example.com/category/post1 is the same as http://www.example.com/post1 in most cases, so want to make sure you don’t get penalized for duplicate content as a result of this. You can either do a change to your .htaccess file to achieve this or add the following to your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /category/*/*

There are multiple ways around this, but the point is to avoid having two exact pages with two different URLs seen by search engines.

Finally, make sure you keep the fresh content coming. Use the keywords properly, and you should see better results by implementing the above changes. There are a few other things that you can do that I will address in a later post.