The undersigned has a good article on optimizing your Wordpress blog for search engines. It also has a collection of SEO articles from other sites including mine.

Some quick tips I would like to give you are

• select a permalink structure with the post title in it. Do not change your permalink structure once you have selected it as changing it will probably invalidate all of the links coming to you
• make sure that your post title comes before your blog name on your title
• Use keyword rich post titles
• use <h1> tags for your blog and post titles
• make proper use of alt tags. End them with a period (.)
• Use tags on your blog. I recommend Ultimate Tag Warrior.
• Use Related posts plugin which will help search engines to digg deeper into your blog
• Use Google Sitemap Generator to let Google know whenever you update your blog. Signup for Google’s Sitemap and add the sitemap that the plugin generated for you. Additionally, Elliot Kosmicki offers a script that will convert your Google sitemap into a Yahoo compliant sitemap that you can submit to Yahoo.
• Use Landing Sites to show related posts to visitors search on your blog

If you are interested in learning more about SEO I suggest you check out our SEO category for more details.

Source: Johntp.com

Follow these simple rules for search engine optimization and your blog will rank much higher in Search Engines.

1. Use your primary keyword in your blog domain

   The first thing to do is to ensure that your blogs URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. Using the targeted keyword in subdomains also helps. (unfortunately not something I’ve done with my blog)For example, if you want to start a HTML tutorial site then the primary keyword you want your URL to contain is html. So choose a URL like www.htmlhelp.com.

   You can also use the keyword in subdomains like www.web-design.com/htmlhelp

2. Use your primary keyphrase in the title of your posts

   If your primary key phrase is html help make sure that the word html and help appear in your blog headers such as H1 and H2 tags as well as the title of each of your posts.

3. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

   If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post. The theory is that the more times a keyword appears within a Webpage, the more relevant the page is likely to be for someone searching those keywords.But do not overdo this by repeating the same keywords over and over again. Google bots can find out if a keyword is too frequent on a page and might just remove your site from their index.

4. Use your keywords in the anchor text of links

   Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages of your blog. Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

5. Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily

   Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

6. Get backlinks from other blogs

   You need as many links as possible to link back to your posts or blog because it will help you build pagerank and get your blog to rank higher in search engines. The more links you have the higher your blog is ranked in Technorati helping your blog to be found easily.So how do you get backlinks?

   • The first thing to do to get high-quality links is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories.Start by submitting your blog to all the directories listed on this page:
     http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
   • Link exchanging with other similarly-themed blogs will help you to form richly interlinked networks or communities.
   • If you find an interesting article on another blog, link to it generously. The trackback will become a link back to your blog.
   • Lastly posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs will help you get backlinks. Regularly post legitimate comments in similarly-themed blogs with high traffic to get many backlinks.
7. Update your blog frequently

   Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

8. Stick with your blog

   Once you start posting on your blog, stick with the same domain or you could end up losing a lot of your traffic and regular readers.Also stick with the topic you selected for your blog. If it’s about pets don’t suddenly switch to another topic such as Gadget’s because you will loose traffic.

Source: JohnTP.com

What is duplicate content?

The first question you may be asking is what is duplicate content?  Well duplicate content generally refers to a substantial block of content within or across multiple domains that either completely matches or is appreciably similar.  Most of the time this is not intended to be malicious in origin but there are other times when people are trying to manipulate search engines results so they duplicate content.

So what isn’t duplicate content?

Content that is written in Spanish and also in English will not be considered as duplicate content.  As well if you have the occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) this will not be considered as duplicate content either.

So why does Google care about duplicate content?

The reason why they care is because they want to provide to their users diverse content if possible.  They want a wide range of information so people get what they are looking for.  If people get duplicate results they will not be satisfied and neither will Google.  So Google tries to make the experience the best it can be for the users who use Google.

What does Google do about duplicate content?

Well there has been a myth for a long period of time going around that Google would completely ban your site and unindex it if you had duplicate content but this is not the case.  In reality what happens usually is the less desired result will fall in the index and not be ranked as highly as the desired results.  In rare cases some duplicate content will be removed from the index but this is the case when the content was made to manipulate Google rankings and deceive the users.  So if you aren’t trying to do this type of thing then having your content published in multiple locations on the internet is fine!

What can you do to proactively address duplicate content issue?

Well here are a few things you can try to have less duplicate content on the net:

• Block appropriately: you can block certain pages from being displayed in Googles index with a robots.txt file.  You can do this for duplicate pages such as a print version of a page that doesn’t need to be in Google’s index
• Be consistent with links: try to be consistent with your internal links. Don’t link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm
• Minimize repetition: For instance, instead of putting the copyright on the bottom of all your pages you could put a summary and have a link to the full copyright page
• Avoid publishing blank pages: if you are creating a page and it doesn’t have any content or does not have complete content then don’t publish it till it is finished.  This will help Google bots index only the pages it needs to
• Don’t fret: If there are people that are copying the content of your website you should be fine.  Don’t worry about them affecting the rank of your pages.  It may be annoying but will be highly unlikely to affect the rank of your site in a negative way

Have I used duplicated content?

Short answer. Yes!

I have duplicated a bunch of my content across websites.  Such as posting content in my blog and then publishing it in article directories and forums.  I usually wait a few weeks after I post it in my blog before I post it else where because I would like to get the original post indexed higher then the other pages but I think posting in more than one place is good.  It is good because it drives different types of traffic to your blog.  You do not want to rely on one type of traffic to support you website.  If you do and that one source for one reason or another disappears you will end up losing all of your traffic.

Summary

So to sum this all up.  Google will not penalize you for duplicate content as long as it is not done in a manipulative way that will deceive the users of Google.  It may lower the rank of some pages in the index compared to others but will not ban the pages completely.

Alexa.com is a website that is used to give you information on traffic levels for your websites.  The Alexa rank is measured by the amount of users who have visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.  Alexa rank may be a bit inaccurate because the method of measuring a websites reach is by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed and visit your site and majority of people who have that installed are more tech savvy.  Therefore more tech savvy websites usually have a higher rank than other websites so the Alexa rank to an certain extent can be a bit inaccurate measure of traffic.

Now you may be asking why is it important to have a good Alexa rank?  Well there are many reasons why you would want to increase your Alexa rank however, the main reason why you want to increase your Alexa Rank is because advertisers and advertising services like ReviewMe and Text Link Ads use your site’s Alexa rank as a way to determine the worth of a link on your website.

So the question now is how can I increase my Alexa rank? There are a lot of ways to do this but the two main ways I have done this are:

• place a Alexa Traffic Rank button on your site
• install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension

By adding these two things to your website you will certainly see an increase in your Alexa rank.  And as mentioned before this is important because many advertisers still use this number to determine the worth of advertising and links on your website.   So try and constantly increase this Alexa rank and if possible get into the top 100k would be a good goal.  This is a goal of mine and I am slowly working my way towards it and will hopefully reach it in the next few months.

So consider these two ways of increasing your Alexa rank.  You won’t regret it!

Note that the title of this post itself is “linkbait”.  Linkbaiting – the idea of writing content that people will be interested in and link to is nothing new to anyone.  However the ART of linkbaiting is something that needs to be done right to draw attention to your blog or website.  The art of linkbaiting is worth mastering for a few reasons:

• It can draw in lots of traffic and have a viral effect on your website where people just spread the word and before you know it everyone links to your website or knows about it
• Incoming links are one of the best ways to get to the top of search engines
• This is also a strategy that Google approves (which is very important because most of your SE traffic will usually come from Google)

What is linkbaiting and why does it work?

As mentioned about linkbaiting is writing content that people are interested in and want to tell others about.  The content is compelling, useful and people feel the need to share the information with others or believe it will improve the quality of their website.  It works because it is relatively simple to produce and doesn’t cost you anything.  As long as you have some guidelines of what type of things attract people to link to your content you are on the right track.  A great example of linkbaiting is WillItBlend.  The reason why this works is because it is out of the ordinary and it is interesting to the “younger” generation.  You can see how people would find throwing an iPhone into a blender could be funny and interesting to watch.

So you may think that if you are good at promoting your content and having it somewhat interesting to people that this ART of linkbaiting will work for you.  For the most part that isn’t the case.   The people who are best at linkbaiting know how to write content that will constantly be interesting to the reader and they try to have at least one a week in their website or blog.  Below are a list of a few characteristics that make a website or a blog good linkbait.

1. A list of useful information in a short concise post

These type of posts in blogs are very interesting to readers because they give the reader very useful information with not a lot of reading.  People like access to their information quickly and they do not want to have to wait for it.  So if you can provide them with a list of the “Top 10″ or the “25 Best” type posts people are usually interested in this type of thing.  Below are a few example title tags:

• 100 Plugins For…
• 15 Tips to…
• 100+ Resources to Help You…
• 30+ Simple Things You Can Do to…
• 25 Ways to…

I think you get the idea.  I have done this technique many times on my website and as you can see majority of them are in the top read posts (right navigation bar).

2. Monitoring the News to bring the lastest news to your blog

Another way to get a lot of good links to your website is by writing on new topics in a timely manner.  If there is something new that is happening in news and it relates to your blog you should see if you can write about it first.  People will be searching for information on it and when they find your site since there are less resources out there they will be more likely to link to your blog.

3. Write on a controversial topic

People like controversy.  Plan and simple.  If there is something to argue about or is politically incorrect then people want to read about it.  Controversy draws attention so if you can write an opposite opinion to something in the news you can probably cause a lot of controversy yourself on your blog and people will link to that because they find it fascinating.

4. The use of fear

This is another technique that people use to draw links into their blog.  You can scare people into reading more and then wanting to link to your post because it is informational.  Something like what has happened recently with the economy in the United States – “The Dow Jones stocks has went down 777 points yesterday costing stockholders $1.2 trillion dollars!”  This type of title would cause fear to stockholders and encourage them to read it out of seer curiosity.

5. Using humor

The use of humor is very effect when it comes to the ART of linkbaiting.  People can find WillItBlend humorous and therefore link to the site.  You can also write funny witty titles that catch the readers attention and make them want to read more.  Once the reader reads more they will realize that it is a great post and want to link to it.

So there you have it.  This is linkbaiting in a nutshell.  You should try yourself to use some of these technique to encourage others to link to your website.  Try to make a habit of doing this once a week and you will be surprized at the type of traffic you can generate from your blog.

What is the easiest most powerful ranking strategy to get your website ranking higher then other peoples websites?  You want to get to the top of the search engine results?  The answer to this question is simple. The Title tag.

Even though this is the easiest most powerful ranking strategy you need to implement the title tags correctly to get the results you want.  Some of you may think that this is no secret to SEO and that is true.  It has been the same thing for years.  If you have a well optimized title tag on your website you will see the biggest increase in rank compared to any of the other SEO techniques out there.  However, if you have poorly formatted title tags you can have lots of issues with showing up in the search engine results.

The key concept with a title tag is to have your best keywords near the beginning of the tag and to make sure that every page has a unique title tag.  You don’t want to have duplicate titles because it does not accurately describe the page and doesn’t help the search engines.  You also want to avoid duplicate content issues.

Also by having keywords in your title tag these keywords will turn bold when they exactly match the keywords entered in the search engines.  This has been shown by research to have increased CTR (Click through rates).

Incoming links are arguably more important for your pagerank but this is usually something you do not have control over.  A well titled incoming link to your website can increase the rank of your website significantly as well.  It is however most important to realize overall that a poorly created title tag can ruin your chances of ranking highly with search engines.

So if you have very limited time to do SEO on your website consider revisiting your title tags and optimizing them.  A sitewide optimization of your title tags can definitely increase the rank of your website the most in a short period of time.

Many of you may be wondering with a niche mini-site is.  A niche mini-site is a website that focuses on a very particular topic and it has only a handful of articles on it.  The point of a niche mini-site is to make it quickly and focus on a specific keyword / topic that is very profitable with publishers.  When trying to make money this way there are a few steps you need to consider before you start building your website.

Keyword Research

Before starting your niche mini-site you need to do a bit of research on the niche you are going to focus on.  There are many niches out there but it might not be the right choice for you if there is too much competition and the niche doesn’t pay very well.  The whole point is to make the website very quickly and then market it and then repeat the process with another website.  One great tool for keyword research is SEO Tools.  What this allows you to do is search for a keyword you are interested in and see how much traffic it receives.  If it doesn’t have enough WordTrackers that have traffic over a 100 daily searches it might not be worth your while.

Once you have found your keyword and it has plenty of searches a day you need to check if it pays well.  You can do this by going to Spyfu.  You take your keyword and you put it in the search at the top and check what the Cost/Click amount is.  If this amount is at least a minimum of a $1 a click then it is most likely worth your time.

Buy A Domain Name and Hosting

It is important that once you’ve picked your niche that you get a proper domain name and hosting for your website.  There is nothing worse then seeing a website on one of those free hosting company websites where they advertise all their own stuff on the website.  What you need is a catchy domain name that people can remember and that is easy to spell.  A good place to get domain names is either NameCheap or GoDaddy. Once you have got that you need to get some hosting for your website as well.  A good place I use is HostGator.  They have cheap hosting that is reliable.

Creating A Website Design/Template

This part can be a little tricky if you are not familiar with web designing or programming.  If you are then this should be a breeze and you should be able to setup a template that you can use multiple times with different colors for most of your niche mini-sites.  If you are unfamiliar on how to do this I recommend possibly purchasing a template or maybe using a blog program like Wordpress.

Creating Content

Next step after having your website all setup is creating quality content for your mini-site.  Do some research on your niche and spend the time to make quality articles.  If your articles have no real value to the readers they won’t be very inclined to stay at the website for a long period of time or ever revisit the website.  So for this step take your time and do it right.  Spell check your articles and get a decent number of articles on your mini-site (7-15 articles should work).

Putting Ads On Your Site

Once you have created content on your website the next thing you will need to do is add some ads to your mini-site.  This is your source of revenue and most likely the reason why you are making this mini-site in the first place.  There are many different ways to advertise but probably the easiest one to start with is Google Adsense.  It is very easy to signup and it only takes a short period of time to be accepted.  All you need to remember is that you follow their policies and guidelines so that they do not shut down your account.

Advertising Your Niche Mini-Site

This step is very important.  If no one knows about your site they will not visit it.  You cannot expect to put a website on the Internet and have it automatically become a smash hit.  It takes months of SEO and online marketing to generate traffic for your mini-site.  Unfortunately with a mini-site you don’t spend that much time working on the site so what you need to do is market your website for a few weeks and just let the site sit and see how the traffic slowly builds with the website.  The older the website the more likely it will get traffic because of various factors such as: links to the site, site age, indexed in search engines, etc.  When advertising your mini-site there are numerous ways you can do this such as: article submissions, social networking/bookmarking, posting on blogs/forums, link exchanges, etc.

Final Step

Just wait a few months and hopefully if everything is done correctly money will start coming in.  Don’t expect to see money right off the bat because you need traffic before you can generate income.  In the meanwhile you can work on creating other mini-sites and do the same process on those sites as well.  If you can create a whole group of these mini-site eventually you will get better at the process and start to see the returns you are looking for.

So try it out for yourself.  Do the research and create yourself a niche mini-site and see how it goes.  Remember to not give up and keep at it and eventually you will become very successful making money online!

One good way to increase traffic to your blog (that I mentioned before in a earlier blog post) is to submit your articles to article directories.   There are many different techniques on how you should submit your blog posts to article directories.  Back in the day when people were just learning about SEO (search engine optimization) it was well known that mass submitting your articles was the best way to go.  However nowadays mass submission of your articles is not as effective and you need other techniques to get the traffic you want for your blog.

Some people say to submit some articles to high quality article directories and then submit others to low quality article directories.  Other people say to submit the same article to multiple articles directories.  These are all theories that may work but below is what I believe is the best way to increase traffic to your blog and not get PENALIZED by Google for using this technique.

First of all I don’t believe you need to submit the same article to multiple article directories.  Your article will eventually indexed as long as you submit it to a quality article directory such as:

• EzineArticles.com
• Buzzle.com
• ArticleDashboard.com
• Amazines.com
• IdeaMarketers.com

Most of these article directories require that you signup but that is usually quite easy and you get accepted in a couple of days normally.  Once you have your article submitted to one of these top article directories you shouldn’t submit it to the other 4 or so top article directories.  What you should be doing is take your best articles and submit them evenly between all of these article directories.  Then what I would do with the other lower quality or shorter articles is to submit them to the top 25 QUALITY article directories (not including the ones above). By doing this you get the most effective technique that seems to work nowadays with search engines and you increase the amount of traffic you receive.

So test this technique out for yourself and see how much traffic you receive from these article directories.  I think you will be surprised that if you keep this up you will have plenty of quality traffic coming to your blog on a consistent basis.

One thing a lot of people struggle with when creating a blog is getting enough traffic to the blog.  There are a number of ways you can generate traffic for your blog.  One way I have found to get great traffic to your blog is with LinkReferral.  This is a great site because what you do is your post your website up and then you review and visit other people’s site to get your rank up on the site so people visit your website as well.  It is a great way to generate a lot of traffic to your website.

You can increase the your rank by viewing other sites, submitting site reviews, doing forum posts, and selecting favorites.  If you are interested in getting more traffic to your blog check out LinkReferral.

Link building is a very important process of online marketing.  It is something that every blog needs to do to get more traffic to the site.  When doing link building you need to realize that a bunch of the website you go to are nofollow.  This means that you aren’t going to increase the rank of your page by having links on these highly ranked page.  Basically what happens is the search engine crawlers cannot go from their site to yours so you do not benefit.  However there are still a lot of forums out there that have a DO-follow type setup.  If you are interested in knowing which sites actually have this do follow check out a list of 100 Do Follow Forums here.