To optimize your wordpress blog, simply follow the following guidelines:

Friendly permalink structure
The first thing to do before creating any post is to change the permalink. Always do this before you post anything. The most friendly permalink structure should be what this site has, with the structure “domain.com/post-name”. I have seen a lot of people tend to use the date and month in the middle of the url, which is not a good thing, as the deeper you put your post in, the harder it gets found, unless you really have a good content.

If you have already used these formats and want to change to my suggested one, then the only thing you can do is to create redirection manually for each pages. Do not try editting htaccess because it won’t work. I have tried it but the next day you woke up, you will find htaccess being rewritten back to the default. It seems like Wordpress will automatically rewrite htaccess file. The only way you could do is to create “permanent redirection” for each page. It is important to choose permanent redirection instead of temporary as it is the one that is seo friendly. From my experience, using this method can successfully changed top ranking pages to point to the new url without losing any ranking. If you are already using the default structure, which is domain.com/?p=5, then simply no need worry. Just changed the structure and it will keep the old pages active instead of error page. Sooner, spiders will update your ranked pages with the new url.

Use suitable tags and structure
Make sure every post you make, the title has h2 tag, instead of some other name created in css. If it has something like “post-title”, change it to “h2″ in the stylesheet. It is important to have h2 tagged titles in every post you make. Always choose a good title for your post. Try not to use the newspaper style of headline. If you are writing about advantages of playing tennis, simply call it “Advantages of Playing Tennis”, it’s strong enough itself. Always put bolds on the suitable wordings or sentences. Adding “li” tags can be a powerful way to make your post looks more orgnaized. Some Wordpress theme has h2 tags on some wordings that should not deserve, such as “Leave a comment” or “Category”. Always change them to smaller as they will not do any goods to you. Always put the correct links in your blog that can allow spiders to follow. Never hide your archives and categories links. Put them at the sidebar. It is important to realise that, without having a link to somewhere, search engine spiders will *never* know the existance.

Use optimized title
The default title Wordpress uses is less friendly to be used as it puts the post title at last. It is better to move the title infront. You can download a plugin called optimal title, which allows you to put on the title, which can show the title anywhere you want. You can use the format “Post Name” - “Site Name”, which is the most effective way. But do remember, don’t always change your mind after making the modification. If you change the format 5 times in a month, it is unlikely your posts will be indexed high and you will be wasting your time.

Install related post plugin
This can be the most powerful thing to do. Always install this plugin, it is an effective way not only making your website looks more valuable and also a great way to improve page views. People who read your article will always want to read more, and at least 5 related articles link put aside or below the article should attract them to go ahead and read more. Try download the related plugin and change it to display 10 related articles instead of 5, if possible. This plugin can also help your post looks more valuable to spiders and making other related posts easier to be indexed too.

Link exchange with quality blog
Never neglect the importance of outbound link in your blog. If your blog has already had some pagerank, you should probably find some link partners easily from forums and blogs. Always choose those with related content to be your partners. It will make your website seen more quality to spiders. If you are starting out and have no partners at all, it can take sometimes to search for the right partners. Always make friends in forums, post actively there. Leaving your blog’s url in signature of every post for many big forums can be a powerful and effective way to promote your blog. Some forums are popular enough that they have high pagerank on showthread.php file or others, it is a good way to increase your PR too!

Get rid of spamming comments and links
We all know people can leave comments in every post, but how valuable are comments? I must admit, comments are extremely valuable. They can make your post rocks so high on a competitive keyword, but only if the content is good enough. Related comments can add more context to your post, in terms of the view from spiders. Having nice people leaving related words is a great way to improve the value of your article. However, there are spammers in the blogging world. Often times you will find people leaving stuff like “buy viagra, cigrattes, etc” in the comments and leave whole bunch of links to unrelated content. These should always be taken as a serious issue because they are killing your post! Do always filter new comments before approving it. There is a nice function in Wordpress that you can use to hold a post if it contains a particular word, or if it has x number of links. Simply go to Options -> Discussion, at the part where it says “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than…”, enter the number as 1. Now, if anyone places a link or more in the comment, the comment will automatically be put on hold. Below it is the Comment Blacklist feature, put in the words that you want to block to prevent undesirable wordings to appear in your blog.

Top viewed posts plugin
Another powerful method you can do is to install the top views plugin. This plugin can display the most popular posts in your blog, thus attracting more readers and improve your pageviews. I think you can change the default number to display, I usually will display the top 15 most viewed posts.

Customize your error 404 page
Always remember to edit the error page. Often times when a post is deleted and there is new visitor coming, wordpress will bring the visitor to the 404 page. Now, you don’t want to miss any new visitor to know more about your site. One thing you can do, is to copy the index.php coding and paste it to the error page. This can let the visitor seeing your homepage instead of a blank page saying the page is not found. Alternatively, you can leave the correct link on the error page, asking the visitor to click on it to arrive on the correct page.

Keeping a fast loading blog
I often see a lot of bloggers putting all sorts of weird codes and frames inside a blog. Never do that, as it slows down the loading of a page and keeps visitors away. Internet users are mostly lazy people, I should say, they rather close the window and go and get a Subway, than sitting there waiting for something to be shown for 2 minutes. You should always make sure your blog has easy navigation for people to browse through the whole site. The default “Next” and “Previous” links are good enough, but you can try to change the anchor text to something like “Read more about %sitename%” and “Read old topics on %sitename%”.

Google sitemap for Wordpress
It was quite a buzz last few years when Google announced that webmasters can use sitemap as a way to communicate with spiders to help getting their pages indexed. According to Google’s website, it states “The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engine crawlers about URLs on your Web sites that are available for crawling. A Sitemap consists of a list of URLs and may also contain additional information about those URLs, such as when they were last modified, how frequently they change, etc.”. Fair enough that a sitemap should do some good to your blog. Learn how to generate a Google sitemaps and submit it to Google to help boosting your indexing power.

CY Tang is a search engine profession, helping websites to get ranked higher with better search engine visibility. Visit his seo blog for any seo tips and advice.

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Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.

SEO = search engine optimization. Good search results are essential to your site. Many people do not go beyond the first page of the results pages so you need to ensure that your site is search engine optimised or you wont get any traffic never mind the right sort of traffic traffic that brings you business that is.

So what are the things you need to do to have a chance to rank well? As every search engine has a different algorithm (which just means a mathematical rule or procedure for solving a problem) and each algorithm has literally hundreds of inputs this may seem like an impossible question to answer. And to answer it with 100% accuracy is impossible but there are certain things that have a major effect that you must do just to stand a chance.

1. Make sure that your site is technically sound and well built with plain English page titles rather than: sessionid=4D6BE5993FFF956660C27184A2F39E81.TC30a?__frame=_top and with all non HTML code (HTML = Hypertext Markup Language and is the basic language used to write web pages) called in from separate directories.

2. Choose keywords and phrases very carefully. Keywords should be the words that customers actually use to find your site when using a search engine. Amazingly most people just ignore this basic fact and never get any research done on the subject!!! That s like turning up to the airport with no money, no ticket and no passport and expecting to get on a plane in other words: nuts!

3. Once you know what keywords to use write a page with a relevant page title for each keyword or phrase using simple language with variations of the keyword or phrase to reach a keyword density of about 5 8% and about 500 words per page minimum with paragraphs that use tags in their sub headings. Make sure that your keyword(s) or phrase(s) appear in each of your pages’ “meta tags . Make sure that ll you photos have descriptions.

4. Find a way to build up the relevant links to your site from other sites. Search engines view inbound links as a vote for your site. Therefore, in general, the more incoming links to relevant parts of your site from relevant anchor text (the visible text in a hyperlink you click to go to another page or website) on other sites the higher your page will rank, but the linking sites must be relevant and links from disreputable sites can harm your ranking.

5. Continually add new content. Sites that continually add new content and new pages get better rankings because search engines like new relevant content. Search engines spiders or web crawlers are a program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that then indexes those pages to provide fast searches. Spiders are always on the lookout for fresh content.

6. Put up a site map which shows every page on the site and has a link to it. This will help the search engine robots find every page. If you are updating regularly then an XML site map for Google that pings Google about every update should be added too.

7. Make sure you have basic management information about the site how many visitors, where they go, where they leave etc. Arguably this is just as important as the site itself as it allows you to improve it based on actual results.

8. Finally build a site for people that is interesting to people. No point in being at the top of the search engines if people just refuse to stay or buy!!! People generally stay on sites that are relevant to what they are looking for at the time, are easy to navigate, easy to read and easy to buy from. Whilst they like prettily designed sites form tend to be less important than relevance and ease of use.They also like interacting via chat rooms or watching relevant movies .

About the Author :

Richard Hill is a Director of E-CRM Solutions, that specialises in CRM, direct and internet marketing [http://www.e-crm.co.uk] for SMEs. He is non-executive Chairman of Innovantage [http://www.innovantage.co.uk] a business intelligence company and a non-executive director of Innovecom [http://www.innovecom.com] a computer networking company.

This article is distributed by: www.iSnare.com

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Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.

If you are a small business and haven’t developed a website yet you are probably considering it, or you should be. If you are selling a product or a service, even if your customers are local then your own website can be a powerful marketing tool. It will only become so if the website is designed correctly, is search engine friendly and most importantly is user friendly. However you might have the greatest looking website ever but it is no good if nobody gets to see it! How do people get to see it? If it appears up there on the first two pages of the search engine then you have a good chance of picking up visitors. The alternative is to do what many larger companies do and that is go the pay per click route. In my experience this can turn out to be an expensive route.
So you have had your website developed now it must be promoted to make it search engine friendly and shoot up the rankings. How can you achieve that? You can do it yourself! There is ample free advice out there on the Web that tells you exactly what you need to do; a simple search will reveal all the information you need. Basically it consists of three things;
1. Add good content to your site 2. Develop links to your site 3. Update your site frequently
Okay so you are the expert in your field so adding good content linked to your keywords is no problem. Takes time and if you haven’t personally designed your site it might require you to embark on a steep learning curve. Otherwise pass the information over to your web designer. This ties in with number 3 on the list, updating your information regularly. By doing so you are adding more content and the more often your site content changes then the more frequently the search engine spiders will visit your site and the higher your ranking should be. I would recommend changing it on at least a once per week basis. Not of course your whole website but parts of it should be added to each week. Again takes time and a little knowledge of how your website works and how to update information on it.
Developing links to your site is probably the most time consuming activity of all. They are important. The more backward links you have the higher your placement in the search engines will be, so long as they are relevant links. Relevant links are ones that point back to your site from other sites with similar content to your own. So for example if you are a contract cleaner then a link back from an equipment or product supplier would be considered relevant, from a photographic studio would not be. Consequently you can go searching for sites that you might be able to link to and ask them. You could join a reciprocal links programme and not be certain of the type of links you are generating. Or you could pay an expert to develop the links for you!
A second way of developing good links is to write articles and submit them to the article distributors and e-zines. Again excellent for the links, driving customers to your website and spreading your own reputation across the Web. Again an amazingly time consuming activity.
A third way is to develop a weblog alongside your website. Excellent for ever changing and additional content and for getting links. It does require constant updating though, daily if possible!
So what does this all add up to? A huge investment of your time, when you should be concentrating on your business. So you do it in the evenings and end up with no social life and possibly no family!
I have been through this process of designing and developing the website and then promoting it to the point were it is ranked very highly on all the search engines for our keywords and also for some that are not! However the time it has taken up is immense and is ongoing because you cannot sit back and relax having achieved your high rankings because your competitors will eventually displace you. So I would strongly advise you, if you have the necessary resources, to invest in a good web design team who will also promote your website as an ongoing entity over time. If you have the money and choose your SEO experts wisely then it will be money well spent. Unfortunately at the time we were doing it we didn’t have the resources so it was a case of do it yourself or not at all, and over the course of the last two years I have learnt to become reasonably expert so see no need to employ somebody else to do it now.
About the Author
David Andrew Smith is the owner of http://www.wesparkle.co.uk a contract cleaning company which specialises in the care and maintenance of natural stone.

TechTags Plugin [ internet marketing | seo | search engine optimization | web site optimization | internetoutfitter ]

Notice: This article above was written by a 3rd party author and included here “as is” for informational purposes only. The authors of this site make no claims and take no responsibility for the accuracy, use or misuse of the content of this article. If you like the article, please visit the authors site for more information.