There are reports all over the internet that there are Google toolbar PR updates going on since early today (May 28, 2009), so watch out for yours.
Last Google Toolbar PR update was in April, so this one came a little early I guess.
There are no official tweets/news from Google to confirm this, but it should be coming soon.
But check out if your site got new PR 
Another quiet Sunday in the blogosphere, as usual. This morning I thought about writing another link share post or a WordPress theme recommendation, but later I’ve decided to break the pattern (since it’s all so quiet) and make Sundays the host of a blog SEO tips series. In this first post I’m going to talk about the importance of using SEO friendly titles (H1, H2, H3) and the right way to do so.
Usual Coding Patterns in WordPress Themes
If you’re somewhat familiar with the WordPress themes, and you’ve taken a look at your theme files. Blog pages are provided through a partnership of a few names with standard PHP files (index.php, archive.php, single.php), with different templates issue, based on the type of content.
The index.php file usually means your home page, is also able to substitute any other model that has not already been defined. Therefore, if you do not have a template for the search results (search.php), index files and will make your search results page.
Each of these templates include small pieces of code to create the final result. The most used are header.php, sidebar.php and footer.php.
For now, we will restrict our attention to the following files in the folder of your theme:
Having your primary keyword present at the top of you page it’s very important.
Considering the fact that most themes come with text based logos instead of graphics, we’ll be looking for the <h1> tag in the header.php file.
If you look at the WordPress default theme will find this piece of code, close to the end of the file:
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
The first line displays your blog’s title into a link to the homepage, inside the H1 tag.
The second line displays your blog’s description.
H1 is the most important heading style and the coding recommendations state that only one should be used per page. When talking about a homepage, archive page or search results, it’s best that we optimize these pages according to our main keywords, therefore this H1 tag is required.
But what about on the single post pages? When we display single post, we would want to have their pages optimized according to their content, not the overall keywords of the blog. This is where the H1 should be removed from the header.php file, and placed instead of the H2 surrounding the posts title, to give make it more visible and representative in the eyes of a search engine spider.
How do we do that? First we need to add some conditional tags in the header.
Look for the piece of code that I’ve listed above and replace it with this one:
<?php if(is_single() OR is_page()) {
// On single post pages and static pages we use this code
?>
<h2><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php }
else {
// On home page and archive style pages we use this code
?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
<?php } ?>
By using some WordPress conditional tags we managed to limit the use of the H1 HTML tag to all archive style pages (including the homepage).
Next, we move to single posts and static pages to continue our optimization.
After we’ve made the changes in the header file, we need to apply some modifications to the single.php and page.php files to make their titles more search engine friendly.
Open the default theme’s single.php file and look for this piece of code:
<h2><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
Remember that I’ve told you we are allowed to used <h1> only once per file, for our most important title / phrase. Since we’ve eliminated the use of <h1> on single posts and static pages in the header.php, now, all we have to do is to change <h2> and </h2> with <h1> and </h1>, just like this:
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
There you go, now your most important phrase on a single post page is the post’s title, as it should be!
Most themes don’t come with this type of heading importance separation and by following this guide you’ll be able to fix this issue on your own with no trouble at all.
While the default theme does not have a page.php template defined, you could clone the single.php file and rename it. If you don’t clone it, the index.php file will be used to display static pages, which means you’ll list page titles using the <h2> instead of <h1>.
For further SEO improvement, you should consider using relevant subheadings inside your post to evidentiate different parts of your post’s structure.
Write down your article and when you’re finished, switch to HTML view and add <h3> & </h3> around you subheadings, like this:
<h3>This Is a Subheading</h3>
Usually, titles are the most important links on your blog. Through them, users and spiders alike navigate through your content. Use them smart and effectively.
If you have any questions or need further help with this, feel free to drop a comment.
Also, join me again next Sunday for a new post in the Blog Seo Tips series.
New layer…
You’ve finally got your WordPress blog online and your hopes up. You’re writing articles and expecting readers to drop-in soon, but time passes and nothing happens. You know your articles are a good reading, so why aren’t readers showing up? That’s because you need to improve your online visibility, your WordPress SEO score.
Let’s say you’ve optimized your home page and/or post page for some keywords, but still search engines refuse to index you higher and searches for those keywords aren’t providing you with any visitors. Most probably, that’s because your content is not relevant in relationship with the provided keywords. At this time, you have 2 choices:
Scan through your posts, find the most common and relevant keywords and modify your keywords meta tag accordingly. Use these keywords in the page’s title tag and for the description try to get a small paragraph that uses in a logic and readable way the provided keywords. The closer this description comes to a text paragraph available on the page, the more relevant it will be.
This option is the most time-consuming, but if you know you’ve got a good keyword list, with good search engine results (only not for you), then it should worth the effort. Always keep in mind how much competition you have for that keyword list, and how powerful that competition is. Otherwise you’re efforts will be in vain. It’s always better to fight for 1.000 relevant results and get the most of it, that for 10.000.000 results and get none.
Once you’ve done one of the above steps, the best thing you can do is to check the results with one of the following free available online SEO tools:
DomainTools.com - The Whois tool available on this domain provides users with a SEO rating of the queried domain, as well as with a SEO browser to analyze you page from a search engine’s point of view. It also makes suggestions on the things that still need to be done to increase your SEO score.
SEOCentro.com - SEO Centro provides user with a very helpful, free online meta tag analyzer. This way you can learn more about your meta tags, their relevance and also the most popular keywords found in your blog’s content.
There are of course many more online SEO tools, but these 2 should be enough to help you find your way around your blog’s SEO.
While working on a couple of WordPress projects these days, I’ve been on the look out for some new WordPress plugins. During my searches I’ve come across some really cool and useful plugins that you might want to check out too.
Tired of the old and sometimes irrelevant automated “Related posts”. This new WordPress plugin allows you to hand pick the links to be displayed at the end of your posts. Also works with off site links. Some might think that it’s a waste of time, other like me will see the value in giving the reader really relevant, hand-picked links.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Aaron D. Campbell
No need to access the FTP or the cPanel anymore to add rules to your .htaccess file. With WP htaccess Control you get to do that from the comfort of your WP Admin screen.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: António Andrade aka Dardna
This is a cool WordPress plugin for all you “magazine-style” fans out there. Ever wanted you posts to be displayed split into 2, 3 or more columns, just like in a newspaper? By adding a shorttag - <!–column–> into your posts you’ll be able to do so. Easy to use, nice result.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Chris Bavota
“Pretty Links” is a nice little plugin that allows you to setup custom URLs on your blog to act as either short URLs or affiliate marketing links. Also features click statistics.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7.1+
Author: Blair Williams
Justin Tadlock, author of the cool Query Posts plugin gives us yet a new useful tool for our blog. The “Template Tag Shortcodes” does exactly what the name says. It takes WordPress’ template tags that you usually use in your hardcoded templates and transforms them into shortcodes that you can also use in you blog posts and pages, in the admin screen. Really cool, and supports over 40 template tags and growing.
Download hereWP Version: 2.5+
Author: Justin Tadlock
This plugin comes in handy when dealing with post series and recurring snippets of code and text in your blog posts. Setup new snippets of HTML code via the plugin admin page, then call them in you posts through a small button that’s added to you post edit TinyMCE editor.
Download hereWP Version: 2.7+
Author: Johan Steen
As all of these plugins are recently released, I would advise some testing before going live. If you have access to a local server of test version of your blog, try using these plugins there first.
Back in 2005, the folks at Google took on an “experiment” that later proved to be a very popular tool for webmasters and SEO people: the Google Sitemaps. Their exact words on the official Google blog were:
We’re undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike.
Ever since sitemaps where added, the Google Webmaster Tools became more and more used and useful, many new features being added over the time.
Based on the main reasons that lead to this successful “experiment”, sitemaps are meant to improve the way your website is indexed and crawled by the GoogleBot.
Furthermore, through the Webmaster Tools interface and using sitemaps, you have access to vital information such as pages that could not be crawled, broken links, search queries that returned your website’s content, queries that drove traffic to your website and many more features worth discovering and using.
As a blogger, you should not worry about that. Arne Brachhold developed a wonderful WordPress plugin that is very easy to manage and automatically generates a standards-compliant XML sitemap based on your blog’s structure. This is one plugin that I include in every WordPress blog I create or administrate, so, from my point of view, it’s one that I “could not live without”, so I highly recommend it.
Download Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin here.
Once you have the sitemap ready, it’s time to upload it to your Google Webmaster Tools account. In order to access these tools, all you need is a Google account. You can use your Gmail login info to access them.
As soon as you log in to your account you’ll be taken to your dashboard. Here you can select through already existing website profiles, add new ones, add sitemaps and confirm your administrative rights (verify) for those websites.
Once you’ve added a new profile using the form on the top of the table - as indicated in the above screenshot - it’s time to verify your site. In the table, you’ll see your new website with two links beside it. One to add a sitemap and one to verify it. Click on the verify link and you’ll be taken to a new screen:
Here, you’ll be provided with 2 verification methods:
It’s up to you to decide which method will you use, the results are the same.
Now that your site has been verified, you can add the previously generated sitemap to its profile, either by clicking the “Add” link, near the website name on the dashboard, or by navigating the left side menu to Sitemaps -> Add a sitemap. Both methods will take you to this screen:
From the initial drop down menu select “Add General Web Sitemap“. This is the most common selection for text-based-content websites like blogs. In the form below, at point 3, enter the URL of your sitemap. This usually is something like: http://www.youblog.com/sitemap.xml, and click the button to submit it.
Allow some time for Google to process the information of your newly added sitemap. Once the sitemap is approved, your sitemaps dashboard will look like this:
From here, you will gain access to report about your crawling stats, sitemap and website status and many more interesting things that you will be able to access through the options in the left side menu of Google Webmaster Tools.
And that concludes this guide. You should now have your Google Sitemap up and running, nice and easy!
Your business’ blog doesn’t have to look boring or childish. If you’re going to use your blog as a tool to promote your business, you need it to have a clean, professional, corporate look. Here’s a round up of 20 of the best free corporate WordPress themes available. Preview them and if you find one of your taste, go ahead and download it.
While some of them are free for personal use, others may be subject to a small one time fee for professional use. Please visit their authors’ sites, available at the “Info & Download” link, to learn more about each of these themes.
modern
Info & Download Here
Preview Here
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If you’re a blogger, by now you have already found out that the majority of your blog’s traffic comes from search engines and social media & bookmarking sites. There is a lot of information available on any of these two traffic sources to help you get started in either optimization you choose to make, although I would suggest you do both, to diversify your incoming traffic.
I know that for many start-up bloggers, the blogs they manage are probably the first contact they had with a website from the role of an administrator, and surely the first contact they had with the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In terms of blog optimization, I have shared with you a few articles in the past that offer a good range of blog SEO tips, so, in case you need to refresh your memory, feel free to go through them again.
The problem is that even with the available information, those new to the concept of SEO tend to try anything and everything, without taking the time to decide what’s best and what could actually damage their rankings. In what follows I’m going to present a list of the top SEO mistakes you must avoid.
From my point of view, this is the biggest mistake a SEO beginner could make. SEO is a set of actions meant to improve search engine rankings, so the most important thing would obviously be to first check out the targeted search engines’ quality and submission guidelines. Here are the links to the guides of two of the most important search engines, Google and Yahoo:
Any further SEO actions you take should abide by the above guidelines. After all, is their “approval” you’re seeking.
There is one common mistake that people do and it’s about the way they understand the concept of using keywords. Keywords are not what you would want you’re website to be found for, but what your website could show up for in relation to its content.
I’ve seen hundreds of websites with that keywords META filled with the most incredible and unrelated words and phrases, most times on the homepage. It’s a mistake to target numerous keywords and actually diminishing that chances to succeed with either one of them.
The development of a keyword strategy is done in strong relationship with your blog’s structure. Just like your blog’s homepage is a gateway to more detailed content topics, so should be its keywords and the keywords of its subpages, categories and posts. Focus on choosing keywords that go hand in hand with the actual content and topics you approach rather than keywords that you’d think might be representative.
Work from your homepage downward in your blog structure, going from more general keywords, to very specific keywords as you get to the posts, like in the diagram below:
keywords
Here are 3 past articles you might find useful when it comes to developing and maintaining a keyword strategy:
When writing and publishing blog posts, many ignore these HTML heading tags. You’ve probably seen that I use them in most of my posts, and not only for optimization reasons. They also help your readers better follow the post’s structure and ideas.
Use appropriate keywords inside these tags. The search engine bots give special attention to these headings and continue to “read” your content based on the information found inside them. It builds up relevancy.
Also, a look at how your theme uses heading tags, SEO wise, would do good too.
Due to not filtering the incoming information on SEO, some people make the mistake on focusing too much on optimizing the meta tags, or the titles, or the body text of posts. Optimization is a process that should cover all aspects in a very close relationship.
Once you’ve decided which keywords to use, make sure you optimize your page title, META’s, subheading, body text, links, alternate (ALT) text on images and so on. The more consistent the whole page looks in terms of optimization, the better the chances of a higher ranking.
No Sir, it’s not! It’s a matter of trial and error, of research and observation of evolution. Don’t make the mistake of resting at peace once you’ve finished optimizing a page or website. Check the results from time to time, adjust your keyword strategy if necessary. You don’t have to do this only because search engines change algorithms. You have to do it also because you’re definitely not the only one targeting those keywords, assuming you’re targeting competitive ones - otherwise, what’s the point?
Research -> Analize -> Experiment. It’s the only path to success, in any field.
The following tips are not necessarily in order of importance, but are in the order you should consider when building a new website from scratch. My top 10 tips ranked by order of importance for high rankings are displayed elsewhere.
The above diagram shows the early stages of constructing a navigation system. The green section (Sub-1) shows how all other sub sections will be. The Home page, All 5 Sub-section, About us, Terms, Contact, Privacy, Resources and Sitemap pages are always interlinked with each other forming 12 strong pages (more about this later)
Getting quality and targeted traffic to the blog is one of the key objectives for any blogger. And this can be only possible if the blog is well optimized and search engine friendly so that the ranking in the search engine result page (SERP) increases and receives more organic traffic through search engines. To obtain better position in the SERP, there are few proven seo techniques and tips that can help to make the blog more search engine friendly.
Here I have discussed some of those proven seo techniques to help you get targeted traffic to your blog.
1. Content is King. Quality and informative content will keep your readers coming back to your blog more often looking for new and fresh content. Use catchy titles with one or two relevant keywords and also some relative keywords in the content so that you can get good ranking in the SERP for many long tail key phrases. You can also refer to any keyword suggestion tools available on the web to get an idea of all the relative keywords for your posts.
2. Update your blog regularly. It helps both from search engine as well as human visitor’s point of view. It Search engine spiders crawl your site more often so that the newer posts indexed quickly. Also your readers who do start trickling in have the urge to continue reading your posts. The more regularly you update your blog, the better it is from all aspects.
3. Start social bookmarking your blog and get it noticed in pinging sites and as these are places where bloggers can get extra traffic from other bloggers. It is essential to do this in order to get the traffic you deserve. Blog ping service notifies the weblog services such as Blog Search Engines and blog directories that your blog has been updated. Thus enabling them to index your blog fast and make your content available for a larger audience.
4. Start indexing your blog in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. so that your posts are crawled by the search engine spiders and your blog will rank for more number of keywords in the search engine result page.
5. Start submitting your blog to blog directories so that you get more number of back links for your blog. We all know links are one of the most important factors that can affect your ranking heavily and directory submission is one of the easiest ways of getting one way links.
6. Comment on other blogs of same niche as you but don’t spam them with just ‘nice blog’ or ‘nice post’ as these comments don’t have any weight. Try to engage with your fellow bloggers by leaving quality comments as that will inspire them to automatically visit your site where the comments link back to.
7. Place your Blog Url in forums and in your email signatures as this can bring extra and free traffic to your blog.
All the bloggers like to see visitors arriving at their blogs and putting their comments regarding the posts. And getting traffic to the blog does not happen automatically unless and until we do some promotional effort like I discussed here in this post. We have to promote it in order to gain the most of our blog.
SEO is a technique to increase organic traffic to a website. The main objective of SEO is to help people find the information (website) relevant to their search query. If they are looking for a keyword or a key phrase and your site’s content is relevant to that searched term, then your site will show in the search engine results page and they will visit your site. Hence, SEO techniques help to get you targeted and relevant human visitors through organic methods.
Neither SEO is a rocket science nor are the techniques easy as many people think. There are many details to follow before optimizing a website. Most tasks are related to keywords, site design and architecture and at the end few off page promotions. To perform this sort of project, you will need to have some professional knowledge. On the other hand, if you prefer hiring an affordable web site marketing company or a search engine optimizer who takes on the project on behalf of clients to carry out it, then it is always good. And you will be able to find the most appropriate for you over the Internet. The role of a SEO company or an optimizer is to offer designs, new ideas, and extra information to guide its clients during the process of changing their websites.
SEO process does not only involve the optimization stage. You must also maintain your website updated by using SEO techniques. You can gain your position in the best search engines if the site is properly optimized. But again it is also difficult to sustain your position in the search engine result page. Although you can work persistently and hard to have a permanent position, it may change gradually. Therefore, you must face a SEO maintenance program. You surely make efforts to rank your website among the first positions, so it is advisable to have a person in charge of the site. Always remember, SEO is a continuous process.
SEO maintenance is not only to keep the same position but also improving it. Maintenance programs may include manual optimization of websites, content addition, blog posting, article submission, directory submission, link programs and competition analysis. Maintenance services are meant for websites that already have search engine rankings; they just want to ensure that they stay where they are and that they improve.
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