We use our 16 Point Strategy for Optimizing WordPress Blogs.

Let Us Optimize Your WordPress Blog Today!

In the past few years Page Rank has gone from something that’s global to something that applies to each keyword differently…

(He goes on to explain more.. you can read his entire post here).

Wow! That is really some insight. I’ve never heard anyone else make that claim, and it makes a lot of sense..

Is this news worthy?? Your thoughts?

1) Update Your Permalink Structure:

We know that Google does not care about how many levels deep a directory is located on your website, although there is rumors that MSN and Yahoo may use this information in their ranking algorithm.

I prefer to keep all my links under my root directory. To do this:

- Log into wordpress and go to Options->Permalinks
- Set “Custom Structure” to /%postname%.htm

2) Install the WordPress Title Tag Plugin:

SEO Title Tag – The most comprehensive title tag plugin, allowing you to edit your entire list of title tags at once, or create the unique title tag as you write each post.

Google indexes 66 characters and up to the 12th Word in your title tag!

Create meaningful, unique, keyword rich, non-spammy title tags for all of your pages.

3) Install the Meta Tags Plugin:

Another WordPress Meta Plugin – Easily add a meta description and keywords tag to each post. Your meta description is still important to SEO rankings! Make sure all your posts have unique meta description tags.

4) Install the Bread Crumb Trail Generator:

Bread Crumb Trail Generator – Generate a breadcrumb navigation structure for your WordPress blog (Ie. Home->Internet Marketing->Reviews), which will show on the pages you specify. I have not tested this on my blog.

5) Install the Sitemap Plugins:

Google Sitemaps Plugin – Create a standard XML sitemap for Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Submit, and for other XML sitemap submissions.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Extremely flexible sitemap generator that links to your XML sitemap. To see an example, view the one I created for this blog.

I suggest changing your footer to link to your sitemap. Adding a sitemap and linking to it from each page allows all your pages to be properly indexed, and helps distribute on-site link juice throughout your website. I use the Google Sitemaps Plugin to create my sitemap, the Dagon Design Sitemap Plugin to generate a viewable (non-XML) WordPress sitemap.

6) Submit Your XML Sitemap:

Sign up and submit your XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Central and
Yahoo Site Explorer. Google Webmaster Central shows you any penalties on your site, the latest crawl dates, external links, and other relevant information.

Submitting a sitemap helps your site get indexed properly, which is a critical part of SEO.

7) Mask Your WordPress Affiliate Links:

Short URL – Mask affiliate links and track the number of clicks on each affiliate link using the WordPress interface.

Search engine penalize ‘thin affiliate’ websites that contain little unique content and many affiliate links. It’s always a good idea to cloak your affiliate links.

WordPress SEO, Part II

First, watch Matt Cutts’s video from Wordcamp which took place a few weeks ago:

View the highlight notes from Matt’s presentation or view his powerpoint presentation. Also check out Matt’s blog post following the conference.

Work keywords into posts and categories.
Use keywords in url paths: domain.com/my-words
– Dashes are best.
– Next best is underscores.
– No space is worst.
Think about the keywords that users will type and include them naturally in your posts.
ALT tags are handy (3-4 relevant words)
Dont forget image search, videos, etc

SEO Tips: Usability

Make sure your site is crawlable.
Make your post creation dates easy to find
Check your blog on a cell phone/Iphone
Use full-text RSS feeds to get loyal users.
Partial feeds get more page views, but not as much love.
Your blog should do standard pings.

Greywolf’s WordPress SEO video:

Reduce Duplicate Content Issues:

WordPress has a bad habit of duplicating content all over your blog. When you have duplicate content on your blog, you are trusting the search engines to find the correct post to display.

Here’s an example robots.txt file you would upload to your domain in your root www directory:

User-agent: Googlebot

# Disallow all directories and files within
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

# Disallow all files ending with these extensions
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$

# Disallow parsing individual post feeds, categories and trackbacks..
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /category/*

9) Remove or NoFollow Any Links to “Bad Neighborhoods”

If you are linking to shady websites, your blog may become associated with that neighborhood and get devalued. You should either remove those links, or add “rel=nofollow” to the link. By adding the Nofollow tag to the link, you are telling the search engines that you do not vouch for the site.

To see all the sites you link to, use the “linkfromdomain:yourdomain.com” MSN command.

You can also use the Yahoo Site Explorer to view your website links.

10) Remove any Cross Linking Outside of Your Blog Niche:

Do not “cross-link” – or link to your friends or your own personal websites, if they are unrelated to the niche topic of your blog. If you do, then add the “nofollow” tag to the link. Again, we want to make sure that we are a hub in the correct website community. By linking to unrelated pages, you may lose topical focus.

WordPress SEO, Part III

11) Redirect Non-WWW Version of Your Site:

Use your .htaccess file to 301 redirect the non-www version of your page:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.website\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Search engines view the www version and non-www version of your website as a completely different sites! This means you are losing PageRank if someone links to your non-www version (ie. website.com) and you are not redirecting it to the www version (ie. www.mywebsite.com).

12) Redirect Error Pages back to Your Website:

Put this into your .htaccess, above your other RewriteCond’s, but under the RewriteEngine On:

RewriteRule ^u/([0-9]+)$ wp-content/plugins/u.php?$1
ErrorDocument 404 /
ErrorDocument 401 /
ErrorDocument 403 /
ErrorDocument 500 /

View my WordPress .htaccess File

13) Validate Your Website:

W3C Check It’s always a good idea to validate your pages, although we are still unsure if W3C validation is being used as a quality signal.

14) Update Your Ping List:

Pinging blog search engines is an easy way to get your blog indexed and get more traffic. Here’s my WordPress ping list.

15) Submit Your Blog:

Submit to blog search engines.

16) Obtain Relevant Topical Links:

Comment spam is one thing, leaving relavant comments on other blogs is another.

Blogs with NoFollow Disabled
Find Blogs with NoFollow Disabled

Alternatively, use this Google query to find .edu blogs to comment on:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” “niche topic”

Remember, search engines do not like spam. Comment spam does not really work. Only leave relevant feedback.

17) Check out other SEO for WordPress Resources:

SEO Book WordPress SEO Post – Customizing Blog Page Titles & Fixing Common Blogger Template SEO Errors

Blog Optimization – Stephan shows you more ways to optimize your blog.

WordPress for Beginners – Step by step tutorial on setting up a new WordPress blog.

SEO Friendly Blog Template Checker – Excellent article that shows you how to use the Web Developer firefox plugin to check if your WordPress blog is SEO friendly.

SEO for WordPress – Straight from the developers of WordPress, this article shows you how to optimize your blog and includes many of the suggestions outlined in this post.

One of my favorite free SEO tools is SEO For Firefox, a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows you to view the SEO profile of any domain. You can have the tool automatically check the pages for any Google search results page. You can also view the SEO stats of any page by right clicking on the page and selecting “SEO For Firefox” -> Lookup This Page.

In this review I’m talking about SEO Book, an Ebook written by Aaron Wall, who is a famous guy in the SEO world. If you don’t know SEO, it means search engine optimization–basically, how you go about getting your page ranked in the search engines.. how you get a high position.. how you get people to find you, go to your page and convert.

So, we’re all interested in that..

I come from a pay per click background, so I’ve always had to pay for clicks, which is a bummer. Now I’m moving into SEO. I’ve realized that SEO is really the future. It provides a long-term sustainable business model where you can continually get clicks without having to pay each time someone visits your site.

I like to travel. When I’m on the road I don’t want to have to check my pay per click campaigns. I want SEO traffic, natural traffic..whatever you want to call it, organic traffic to constantly come to my website. I don’t want to have to do a lot of work. I want to set up websites, get them built, get them designed in the right way, and have them generating revenue for the long term. Then hire copywriters and content writers to continue to build the site.

Back to the review..

I got the SEO book sometime in the last few months. Aaron does a great job of keeping it up to date. The ebook that I have is published January 2007, but I think by now there’s probably another edition. Aaron always keeps track of the latest changes in the algorithms, and what works best.

This is the best ebook I’ve read on the subject of SEO and it’s really the industry standard for SEO ebooks. It’s 331-pages. Each page is filled with really good tips.

Just to give you a little background, Aaron Wall got kicked out of the military in 2002, and just 3 or 4 years later he had become an expert in search engine optimization. And he’s now an industry expert who speaks at conferences and publishes one of the best selling ebooks on the internet.

Here’s some of the topics you’ll read about in the ebook. It’s not a comprehensive list, but this is what you can expect to find in this ebook.

Click here for a complete Table of Contents

He talks about ideas..how to pick your idea, finding the right business model and niche, so he really starts from the first stage if you don’t already have a website.

He goes into how to pick a product that you are interested in. This is one of the things I see a lot of affiliates not doing. They set up websites in subjects they are not really interested in, and the website eventually becomes stale from neglect. So if you are interested in the topic that you are writing about, blogging about, the subject area your product covers, you will have much better success. That’s one of the topics he covers and I want to highlight.

Aaron goes into oversaturated markets.. how to find a product that people will buy and that’s right for you and your business. He talks about differentiation, and how to apply that to the internet. Picking a domain.. is it brandable? Does it have your primary keywords in it? Picking a host..

He covers the list of keyword tools he uses and does a good job of giving us a lot of resources to check out. At the end of the ebook, he provides his personal list of all the directories he submits to. These are directories like Yahoo, Dmoz, Business.com (use promo code AVIVA for a $40 discount), JoeAnt, Best of the Web, Gimpsy. Lots of really valuable directories that will immediately help your site get higher rankings.

For those of you just starting out in SEO, you’ll find that links are very important to high rankings. Advanced people.. just bare with me here.. Aaron goes into how to get good links which is covered in the “Page Optimization” section.

He talks about how to get your website to function in the most effective way..optimized navigation structure such as “breadcrumb navigation” that will help your site get indexed completely without going into what we call “supplemental hell” (the supplemental index of Google).

He goes into homepage optimization.. How to build credibility, theming, internal link structure..

If you don’t know much about PageRank, let me give you a little background. Pagerank is the basic algorithm Google uses to calculate the ranking of websites in its index. We know a lot about this because the Google Guys published a lot of their research about Pagerank while at Stanford.

So PageRank looks at in-links and out-links. If your in-links, or internal linking structure of your website isn’t optimized, then your going to have what’s called “edges” or “dwarf pages” .. pages that don’t link out or don’t pass link juice effectively.

Why do the search engines care about who links to you and who you link out to? They want to provide the best result for a search query. The search engines want to make sure that the person who is searching finds what they are looking for.

If the searcher goes to a website with no out-links, and there’s only internal linking, then your website in the eyes of Google, provides limited value and is not really a good resource.

Aaron then goes into site optimization, how to make a sitemap, deep-linking..

What is deep-linking? For instance, if you buy links, and all your links go to your home page, well.. that’s a little suspicious because that’s not the natural link profile of a website. Same goes for using all the same anchor tags.. it’s going to look fishy. If you have a ‘Links’ page with a name like ‘Link Exchange’ .. those are stop words, words that can result in your website being devalued and therefore not appearing in the top search results. These are the little tips and tricks that you find throughout the book..

Then he goes into directory registration. He gives you a list of all the directories that you should apply to become listed in, which includes major and second-tier directories and niche specific directories.

How do you find these directories that will give credibility to your website?

He says you need to think about it in terms of the search engine. If you were the editor of a search engine, would you want an overly optimized page with no real value come up first in your search results? No.. You would want to see a website that satisfies the goal of the searcher.

Search engine optimization is no longer just putting your keywords in your meta tags. Thats something thats still important, and Aarron and I both still recommended it, but its certainly not going to help you if you have no content and links pointing to your site.

Link building.. What is link baiting?

For those who don’t know.. For example, if you get an article on digg.com, you will probably get hundreds of links as a result. Now the traffic you get from Digg is pretty lousy, because Digg users don’t really click on Adsense, they don’t really do much but take up bandwidth and bounce. But the permanent thing they do leave is links. So you have to start thinking of links in terms of monetary value they provide.

He covers link trading.. and building links through press releases and forums.. How do you optimize for the constant algorithm changes? How do you structure your page?

SEO Abuse

Now again, I’m going to stress this. Search engine don’t want to return the most optimized page, but the page that best satisfies the searchers goals. That’s a direct quote from page 13. So if you have the same keywords in your H1 tag, in your title tags, meta tags.. that’s going to look unnatural and it’s not going to work.

Social Relevancy– there’s so much this ebook covers that I’m not going into detail about. He has a chapter on the history of the search engines. Aaron provides a really good glossary of terms.

Then he goes into Spam. What is spam? What is cloaking? What are door-way pages? Why should you not use them?

Now some of you probably have blackhat websites..

Just to get a little off topic here.. Matt Cutts, who is the lead Quality (ie. don’t mess with him) engineer at Google, brought his laptop to one of the Search Engine Strategies conferences last year. He then looked up a name or website of someone in the audience. And he showed everyone all the websites that webmaster owned. Now, the webmaster was using private registration for his domains. I’m not sure exactly how they are doing it.. through the Google Toolbar or some other method, but Google is basically building webmaster profiles. So if you are doing something blackhat on one of your sites, they might tie that together and penalize all your sites. I’m not saying that’s happening now, but that may happen in the future.

Google is looking a lot at credibility indicators such as the amount of time spent on a website by the average visitor. They can do this now because they bought Urchin, which is now called Google Analytics. Google may also use the Google toolbar as another credibility indicator. Remember, we know that Google uses over 200 factors in its search ranking algorithm. Aaron talks a lot about these topics in his ebook.

At the end of the ebook, he even goes into selling SEO services. So if you read the book and learn about SEO and then want to sell your consulting services, he tells you how to effectively sell your services.

Lots of bonuses here.. SEO interviews with top search experts in the industry. Mini-Sites PDF which shows you how to build mini-sites. 33-days to online profits.. And his personal arsenal of SEO Tools and online resources.

Really this is the source, the standard SEO book in the industry. If you are doing SEO, if you are building websites, get this book. It’s one of 3 ebooks I’ve ever purchased in my life and it’s one of the best out there. So check it out.

Click Here To Get Aaron Walls’ SEO EBook