WordPress is becoming the king of the blogging community because of its amazing capabilities. It features options for the most advanced users but is also very easy to use for beginners. The ability to customize it to your needs has made it increasingly popular. But how do you customize it to be popular with the search engines? Everyone wants their web site to show up high in Google and other major search engines. Here are some must do tips to make your WordPress blog search engine (and user) friendly.

1. Content, Content, Content. That’s the whole purpose of your blog, right? Too many people neglect web site visitors when trying to optimize their web sites for search engines. You must remember that your site is intended for human eyes and it must be natural and reader friendly first, before making it search engine friendly. Using spammy SEO techniques may bump you up a little bit in the search engine results but if you notice the top results, they are always reader friendly.
2. Your first step towards making your WordPress blog search engine friendly should be to change your Permalink structure. The default WordPress setting is anti-SEO friendly. A typical blog post with the default Permalink structure looks something like this:
   

   http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

   Within your WordPress settings, they have some other Permalink structure options. You will want to select an option that uses the title of your posts in the URL. For example:

   http://www.yourdomain.com/2007/04/27/sample-post/

   This is one of the options provided to you but WordPress also gives you the option of creating your own structure. This is necessary for your blog’s SEO success because it makes the URL much friendlier to search engines, and also can provide some keywords in your URL which will always help your ranking status. It helps your web site visitors also because it gives them a rough idea about what your post is about. They are also more likely to link your blog postings if they have more readable URL’s instead of the “/?p=123” situation. It is important to change your permalink structure in the beginning stages of your blog. But if your blog has been around for a while with anti-SEO-friendly url structure, and now you want to switch to SEO-friendly Permalinks, you can try Permalink Redirect plugin, which will automatically redirect existing blog urls according to your new permalink structure by means of 301 permanent redirect. This plugin is useful when you want to switch to a new permalink structure without losing existing SERPs of your blog contents.

3. Page titles are a very important factor in search engine rankings and your blogs page titles are no different. The default WordPress setting automatically generates your titles to look like this: “Blogname – Blog Archive – Post Title.” To optimize your blog for search engines, you should switch the Post Title and Blog Archive positioning. When people use a search engine and come across your blog, this title is the linking text that they click on. The words they searched for will be bolded so you want those words to be to the far left as possible. Swapping these two positions will do that for you. In order to change this, you will have to edit your header.php file. You will want to find the code that looks like this:
   

   <title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

   and replace it with this code:

   <title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘–’; } ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title></li>

4. Sitemaps are a necessary part of any search engine optimization campaign. Sometimes creating a sitemap can be tricky with frequently updated contents. Fortunately with WordPress, there is a handy sitemap plug-in that will do all the work for you. All you have to do is install the plug-in.
5. Many bloggers using tagging as a way to list their posts in different social networking sites. The Ultimate Tag Warrior is another WordPress plug-in that will assist you in creating these tags. These are similar to the categories that are already implemented in WordPress but it is an additional form of categorizing that will help you in the “Web 2.0” sites like del.icio.us and Technorati. You will also want to take advantage of the Meta tags by inserting relevant keywords and page descriptions.
6. After you have optimized your WordPress blog with different plug-ins and options, you will want to get your blog listed in many of the blog directories available. Search engines count links to your sites as votes towards its popularity. You only want links (or votes) from sites that have similar content to yours. There are many blog directories out there that meet this criterion. Also, if you enjoy reading someone’s blog who has similar interests to yours, send them and e-mail and request a link to your blog. Listing your web site in your forum signature or e-mails may not give you credit for a link but if readers enjoy what you had to say, they may be more inclined to visit your web site and possibly link to it in the future.

Everyone who has studied a little bit of search engine optimization (SEO) knows that linking is one of the key factors to a successful campaign. Many people overlook one of the easiest and most influential types of links they can get, “internal links.” As those who have tried to get good, relevant external links know, it’s not always easy. With internal links, you have complete control over where your links are, what type of links they are and what your anchor text says. Although the benefits of internal links and external links differ, they are both vital to a successful search engine optimization campaign. As simple as it sounds, it is one of the most commonly overlooked steps in most campaigns.

Internal linking can help the most by:

• Aiding the search engine spiders in locating all of your pages which results in more of your pages being indexed in the major search engines.
• Inserting more of your keywords on each page, making your page more relevant and building keyword density.
• Helps boost the Google PageRank of your internal pages when linked to from your main page.

Here are some tips and more information about all these areas and how you can maximize your website to take advantage of internal linking.

Getting Your Pages in the Index

The concept of search engine indexes is simple: you want as many or all of your web pages to be represented in all the major search engines. The more pages you have in search engine indexes, the more likely your site will come up for search queries. If you are participating in an SEO campaign, you have researched keywords and have targeted these keywords. One of the great things about getting your pages in the index is that you will start to show up for all kinds of queries that you hadn’t even targeted.

Internal linking can help get more of your web pages indexed because you are providing links to each of your pages on every page. Imagine you are shopping on a website; you click a link to a product from the first page. You are done looking at this product but there are no links back to the main page or other categories or items. Where do you go? The search engine spiders have the same problem. If you provide links to all your other pages, your visitors and search engine spiders will always have more pages to look at and index.

One of the most important parts of internal linking is to make sure that you have text links somewhere on your pages. Many websites use trendy flash and script code for their navigation. These websites look great but they are not always search engine friendly. Search engine spiders can’t see the code in flash and other script code and therefore are not able to follow the links within them. If you use flash or another script code for your navigation, you must ensure that you have text links to your important pages somewhere else on your web page. In a lot of cases, people will put their text link navigation towards the bottom of the page. If you can avoid flash for navigation, that is your best bet. But if you can’t switch, make sure you provide text links also. Search engine spiders can follow image links but they don’t carry as much value as text. If you do use image links, make sure you use ALT tags that appropriately describe the image. This will help the value of your image links.

Keyword Relevancy and Density

The idea of using keywords is pretty basic; you want your keywords to show up on your pages. Even more important than just showing up on your page, you want your keywords to be used in the anchor text of your links. If you have a website page that is about MP3 Players, typically you’d want the anchor text of the links on your other pages to say MP3 Players. It is far more beneficial to use keyword text than the words “click here” or “homepage.” Additionally, some search engines still look at the keyword density of your pages. Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to other text. If you want to show up for MP3 Players, you should have the appropriate keyword density. Be careful though, overstuffing keywords and having a high keyword density ratio can hurt you more than help you.

Using keywords for your anchor text in inline text links is always a very good idea. It may be obvious to use keywords in your navigation links but linking to internal web sites in your page copy may help you even more. If your web site is set up to sell MP3 players, you obviously are going to have the words “MP3 Player” in your page copy somewhere. Instead of just letting this text go without links, use this text to link to your page about MP3 player information or MP3 player product pages.

Boost Your Internal Pages PageRank

Your internal pages’ PageRank can be affected by the PageRank of your homepage. Typically, your homepage carries the highest PageRank of any of your pages. The best way to let your homepage influence the PageRank of your internal sites is to make sure you have internal links from your homepage to only your most important internal pages. You may think that it’s a good idea to list all of your internal pages on your homepage so that your homepages PageRank is distributed to all your pages but this will actually be more detrimental to your internal pages PageRank. If you distribute your homepages PageRank among 100 links, less of the PageRank is trickled down to your other pages, resulting in a lower PageRank. Only put links to your most important and relevant sites on your homepage and boost their PageRank.

Most Important Tips to Implement Internal Linking

• Use text links for your navigation menus on the left hand side of your homepage. If you put your text link navigation on the left hand side, it will be one of the first thing crawled by the search engine spiders.
• Use keywords in your internal linking. Don’t go overboard and cram keywords in there but keep it looking natural and informative.
• Use the footer for navigation text links. The footer is a common place to put your navigation text links. You can also list other pages like your sitemap which will help you in getting more of your web pages indexed.
• Use inline text links. There are many reasons to include inline text links. Many people believe that the search engines place extra value on these types of links and view them as more important since they are in your page copy and not part of your navigation.

Improving your internal linking is a major step in your search engine optimization campaign but as you will see, it is a very important one and one of the few steps in a campaign that you have total control of. If you effectively use internal linking (and don’t abuse it or spam) then you will see more of your pages being indexed and potentially a higher ranking in the search engines.

Completing a successful search engine optimization campaign for your web site can be a very frustrating and difficult task. There are hundreds upon hundreds of search engine optimization tips out there. Some are reliable while a lot are not. The world of search engine optimization changes often and new tips and tricks are used to manipulate the search engine results rankings. While this may work in the short term, Google and the other top search engines frequently tweak their algorithm to render this “quick fixes” useless. Be careful when trying out any “hot new search engine optimization tip” because it may end up with your web site being removed from the search engine’s index and your web site will become practically useless. Here are some common search engine optimization mistakes and practices to avoid. While these little tricks may seem like they would help you rank better in the popular search engines, they may actually have the completely opposite affect and lower your ranking or get your web site banned all together.

• Cloaking – This is one of the quickest ways to get your site banned and removed from Google and other popular search engines. Simply defined, Cloaking is displaying different content to the search engine spiders that crawl your web site and your web site visitors. Most people use redirects or different kinds of programming to perform this cloaking technique. An example of cloaking would be to display information that would lead search engines to think your web site is about real estate in Los Angeles but when a searcher clicks on your web site, it shows them ads for Viagra and Cialis.
• Duplicating your content – Google doesn’t want the top 10 search results for “Los Angeles Real Estate” to be the exact same content just reproduced on 10 different web sites. That is why you need to avoid duplicating your content on your various web sites. Worse than that would be copying content from other people’s web sites. Not only is this risky because of Google finding duplicate content but you may also be in violation of copyright laws and could face legal issues. It is very important to have unique content on your web sites.
• Keywords Meta tag abuse – The keyword Meta tag isn’t very helpful to your rank in the search results anymore but you still want to avoid overstuffing this tag with hundreds of keywords. Only list the most important and relevant keywords to your site. Abusing this Meta tag by listing hundreds of keywords, repeating keywords or listing keywords that have nothing to do with your site’s content will actually hurt your ranking in Google.
• Hidden Text – One of the oldest keyword stuffing techniques available, hiding text on your web site is easily detected by Google and the other major search engines and will result in a lower search ranking or removal from their index. Hiding text can be done by filling your background with keywords and then matching the color of the text with the color of the background so that it cannot be seen by humans. A variation of matching the color to hide text is to make the text incredibly small so that it won’t be seen by your web site visitors. Either technique of hiding text on your web site is a big mistake and will not help your cause.
• Bad Links – Links to your web site are one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. Clever search engine optimization experts noticed this and would obtain links from any source possible. As with every other abused search engine optimization technique, the search engines have recognized this and will penalize you for links that come from known link farms (sites whose sole purpose is giving links). When looking for links, you want to direct your efforts towards sites that have related content to your own. If you are a real estate agent, gaining links from your brother’s rock music blog isn’t going to help you.
• Extra Title Tags – Adding extra HTML code to include multiple title tags is known as “Title Slacking” and can easily be discovered by search engine robots. People try to stuff more keywords into the very important title tag by duplicating the tag. The effects of this are not seen by the web site visitor but originally, this may have helped you rank better for those particular keywords.

By avoiding some of these very common search engine optimization techniques, you can be assured that your web site will not be penalized and drop in the rankings. More importantly, you can also avoid have your web site removed from the index of the major search engines which is not easy.

If you’ve been involved in search engine optimization (SEO) for more than a day, you know that the best SEO techniques and rules can change at any time. If you go to your local library to learn about search engine optimization you’ll be lucky to find anything, let alone anything up to date. The most current information about search engine optimization has to be found on the web. And for those who are new to this industry, it can be quite a challenge. Valuable information can be found and learned by visiting different SEO blogs and forums but any information taken from these is only as trusted as the person who wrote it. Here is a list of well known (and very respected) search engine optimization experts that you can trust and learn a lot from.

Danny Sullivan – One of the original SEO experts, Danny Sullivan’s expertise dates back to April 1996 when he published research about search engines called “A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines.” About a year later, Danny started Search Engine Watch which is still available today. Search Engine Watch is a resource to those in the SEO industry. You can find tips, news and other information about everything to do with search engine optimization. Another popular SEO resource, Matt Cutts of Google, has said that Search Engine Watch is a “must read.” In addition to Search Engine Strategies, Sullivan began the Search Engine Strategies conference that is one of the most popular search engine optimization events. Danny Sullivan continues to own his own consulting business and maintains a personal blog called “Daggle.”

Matt Cutts – Google’s search engine optimization expert, Matt Cutts, has been known to give advice and a little insight to how Google search works on his blog. Cutts studied information retrieval at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill while working towards his Ph. D. Although Matt only finished with his masters degree from the university, he obtained a job in Google’s quality group and has worked hard to uphold Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and ensure that tricky SEO experts don’t damage the quality of Google’s search engine results.

Aaron Wall – Widely known for his e-book titled SEOBook, Aaron Wall is known as one of the top search engine optimization experts in the industry. SEOBook is one of the most popular search engine optimization resources available because it is frequently updated by Aaron. And since this book is distributed through the Internet, the updated version of this book can easily be obtained. Aaron Wall shares his insights on SEO and sells his e-book through his blog (www.seobook.com). Wall also introduced Threadwatch.org which is a very popular forum where many people can share information and ideas about SEO and Internet marketing. Wall was also a part of one of the most closely watched lawsuits by Internet bloggers. Aaron Wall was sued for comments posted on his blog which raised the question about who is responsible for blog postings. Aaron’s case was dismissed.

Rand Fishkin – Owner of the extremely popular SEO website resource and Internet marketing firm SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin contributes to blog posted on SEOmoz.org along with other trusted experts in his marketing firm. Fishkin is a well known SEO expert and participates in many of the conferences including Search Engine Strategies and PubCon. Rand Fishkin began a big buzz with an anonymous website that was created to help him buy a Super Bowl advertisement to propose to his girlfriend. Unfortunately the plan fell through but Rand was able to propose to his girlfriend during her favorite television show, Veronica Mars.

Barry Schwartz – The youngest SEO expert in the group, Barry Schwartz is known for his blog and reporting of search engine marketing news. Beginning in 2007, Barry became the editor of Search Engine Roundtable, a resource for search engine optimization news. Schwartz is also the CEO of RustyBrick, Inc. which is a web development company based in New York. Barry Schwartz is very active in the SEO community with his own sites as well as contributing to Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land, where his is a news editor and a moderator on Search Engine Watch and WebmasterWorld’s PubCon.

There are hundreds and hundreds of different SEO strategies available. Some of them are considered “off-site,” meaning the work you are doing to promote your web site isn’t actually being done to your site like link building and advertising. The other type of SEO strategy, “on-site SEO,” refers to different tactics and practices you use on your actual web site like headers, content, etc. While both are very important for your overall SEO goals, on-site optimization gives you more control over your efforts since it is being done to your own web site. Depending on your reasons for beginning an SEO campaign for your site, you may need to do all or some of these tips. Regardless of your motives, all of these SEO strategies are proven to be important for SEO and the overall look and feel of your web site.

• Title and Description Tags - This is one of the easiest and most important things that you must do for your web site. Currently, the titles of your web pages are having a great impact on your search engine rankings. Many of the top SEO professionals agree that this might be the biggest factor in search engine results right now. The description tags won’t have quite as much effect as the title tags but it’s important to write a nice, 2-4 line description about your web site and what its purpose is. It is also important that you have unique titles for all of your different web pages that describe the content on the page. Using your targeted keywords in both your title and description tags will help you rank for those words.
• Content Titles and Subtitles – Search engines will recognize the H1 and H2 tags in your source code. Use CSS files to set the font, color, etc. of your titles and subtitle so you can take advantage of the H1 and H2 tags. The search engines will find those tags and place an importance on the words within them so it makes sense to use some of your targeted keywords within your titles and subtitles. Search engine place a bigger emphasis on these because they believe that people use their title and subtitles to describe the content of the page. If you match some of the keywords in your H1 and H2 content titles as well as your web page titles, you will rank higher for the keywords you are using.
• Use Text Links - JavaScript and other recent programming codes have made the appearance of web site more sleek and interactive for the users. Many people are using JavaScript for their web site headers and navigational buttons. The problem with JavaScript is that it is basically useless for search engine bots. They are unable to read the text (which may be important keywords) or follow any of the links you have set to your other pages which may result in few of your pages being indexed. If you can avoid using JavaScript for navigation, it will help more and more of your web pages make it into the search engine’s index. If you can’t avoid using JavaScript, place navigation text links at the bottom of your screen. When linking on your site, use informative anchor text like “Product XYZ” instead of “click here”.
• Content – The days of keyword stuffing are long gone. Overloading your page copy with your targeted keywords is going to hurt you more than help you. Use your keywords naturally as if you didn’t know they were keywords. Internet users will recognize when you’re overloading your text with keywords. The most important part about your content is that it’s informative, well-written and reads naturally.
• Use Static Pages - It is very important that all the information that you would like indexed in the search engines is on a static page. The search engines have much harder time locating and indexing dynamic pages. This will also help you when you are doing off-site SEO like link building. You are also much more likely to receive links from other pages if your URL is not excessively long and easy to remember.
• Robots.txt – Use the robots.txt file to prevent the search engine bots from indexing content that you don’t want indexed. The robots.txt file gives you the most control over the search engine spiders and lets you guide them through your site.
• Links Page – If you trade links or just like to link to lots of other web sites, it looks better for users and search engine bots if you group them into a directory on a separate Links page that is accessible from your main page or site map.
• Site Map – A site map is a quick fix to getting more pages indexed. Make sure you link to your site map from your main page, typically in the footer. While you are creating your site map, always use text links to help the search engine spider go where you want it to. If you have hundreds of web pages, create your site map in a hierarchal form with only your higher level web pages. Many search engines also support the use of a sitemap.xml at the root of your site. In your sitemap.xml file you can do all the things you do in a static sitemap page but also give the spider some more information like how often each page is updated.
• Alt Tags – When you put an image on your web site, you have the option of using ALT tags to describe the image. ALT tags are beneficial because if your image doesn’t load, it will display the ALT tag text instead of a blank box. Internet software for the visually impaired also uses this text to help describe what is on your web site.
• 404 Page – Include links to your homepage, main categories and possibly a search box on your 404 page so lost visitors can find what they are looking for instead of leavings your site.

Many website owners visit webmaster-related forums such as Digital Point, Site Point, Namepros, and many others on a frequent basis. Every user on these forums gets a signature, a message that is automatically added below each post made by them that can contain texts, links, or even images. These signatures can be very valuable for Internet marketing purposes.

The value of forum signatures is two fold. First, forum signatures can provide high quality exposure and generate targeted leads to the business that utilizes that space. For example, comments posted at an Internet marketing forum will receive targeted exposure from the Internet marketing community and webmasters in related fields, and naturally, signatures plugged into these posts will attract their attentions as well. Whether the signature space contains a link to a web site, corporate brand image, or political slogan of your choice, it sure will catch the eyes of the targeted community behind the forum.

The second benefit of forum signature lies in search engine optimization. Due to the advances of forum scripts as well as search engine spiders’ crawlability, it is pretty common nowadays that website links shown in forum signatures are crawled and indexed by search engines. For example, Digital Point forum, one of the most well-known Internet marketing forums, has more than 140,000 Google-indexed forum pages as of March 2007, and these pages contain individual forum members’ signatures as well as any website links contained therein.

If you place a web site link in your signature and make posts on a heavily crawled search-engine friendly forum, you may be getting as many back links to the web site, that are quickly indexed by search engines. The benefit of such forum back links depends on how popular and how authoritative the forum is in the eyes of search engines. Most forums with more than 100,000 non-spammy human posts usually have very good search engine rankings. You can check the search-engine authority of a given forum by posting a few time and checking how soon your posts are indexed by search engines.

The back links from forum signatures will not count as many different back links coming from different domains, but forum signatures are a great free way to increase Google PageRank and search engine rankings. A recent case study conducted by several webmasters at NamePros.com revealed that with just one link in the signature of a user with 50 posts, they were able to increase the Google PageRank of their new sites from PR0 to PR3.

Although forum signatures bring these marketing benefits, individual signatures are not equally valuable. Naturally, the more active you are as a forum member, the more frequently your signature shows up, and thus, the higher benefit it will bring. Not only the number of posts, but also the quality of your posts determines the value of your forum signature. The signature space of a member who posts five knowledgeable and thoughtful comments a day will exert more power than that of a member who posts dozens of meaningless spams, both in terms of quality exposure and in terms of search engine ranking benefit.

You would like to have the benefits of the signature space, but do not have time to make posts and engage in a forum community? Then you can purchase other members’ signature space. At the Digital Point forum’s Marketplace, signature links are purchased and auctioned off in the “Links” section for a range of monthly prices. A signature from an active and reputable member is being purchased for as much as $40 to $50 per month. Such high price tags allude to their effectiveness.

If you have not tried forum signature marketing yet, maybe you should. You will be surprised at the result!