8 Effective SEO Techniques Every WordPress Blogger Should Use

There’s no doubt that social media has become the marketing medium of choice for the new, seasoned and tech savvy blogger. Personally, I can attest to the fact that there are strong relationships that are built through the effective use of social media and tons of readers at sites like Twitter and Facebook to woo to our blogs.

At the same time we should never forget the power of effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the driving force it holds for the casual and professional blogger. It has become super easy to do through some excellent features and plugins for WordPress and its mastery can easily become second nature for the everyday blogger.

Let’s look at a few SEO techniques that can put your blog on the search engine map including some that most bloggers tend to ignore.

1. Effective Navigation Setup

Always ensure that your navigation links are properly structured and placed on your blog. Navigation links need to be relevant to the content they represent, should never be broken or point to pages that have no content. A crowded and poorly structured site navigation gets you nowhere with your readers and search engine crawlers.

2. Appropriate Tags For Images

Images play an important role in enhancing the look and feel of our blogs and can better capture the attention of our readers more than plain text alone. Images should be used sparingly and when used they need to be of reasonable sizes in terms of (kb) and should have title tags that describe the content they represent. Its very important to use titles that have a strong relation with the supporting post’s content.

3. Maintaining A Working Sitemap

A sitemap helps search engine crawlers to effectively identify pages and posts that should be indexed and made accessible to visitors through search engines. It is basically a file named sitemap.xml which is usually located within your blog’s root directory. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin will help you to easily create and update your sitemap when changes are made to your blog and it also notifies google and bing about the changes. This will significantly increase your site’s crawl rate.

4. Awesome WordPress SEO Plugins

SEO techniques like customizing post titles, description and keywords can be quite a huge task to do when using a bare WordPress theme. The free SEO plugin All In One SEO Pack can make the task 100 times easier and when installed presents options to easily optimize your blog posts and pages.

5. Using Pretty Permalinks

Your blog should never have URLs that look like this: www.yourdomain.com/?pageid=21, just like humans, search engine crawlers do not recognize this type of information and is thus useless. Customizing pretty permalinks in WordPress will allow you to use URLs like: www.yourdomain.com/great-post, which are 100% recognizable and will contain keywords for your posts that will make them easier to be found in search engines.

To change your permalinks go to Settings in your WordPress dashboard, then select Permalinks. Select the custom structure field and enter, /%postname%/ and click Save Changes. This will create a permalink structure of www.yourdomain.com/postname/ which is the most search engine friendly URL structure for your blog. In the case where you have been blogging for a while and would like to make the change, it is very important to use the Permalink Migration plugin to prevent your links from breaking and losing pagerank.

6. Internal Linking To Related Articles

Linking to other related posts within your blog will help to direct search engine crawlers to other pages of your site and also provide an opportunity to enforce what those pages are about. This will also encourage readers to click through to other pages in your blog which is always a good thing. Appropriate link titles should be used to describe what the pages are about.

If you wish to automate this process you can use the SEO Smart Links plugin that will automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with related posts, pages, categories and tags within your blog.

7. Usage Of Valid XHTML Mark-up

A poorly coded site can lead to crawlers completely abandoning your blog depending on how bad your site’s markup really is. Bad markup can stop a crawler in its track because it may not understand what your site’s code is really doing. Use the W3C Validator to get an idea of the status of your blog’s code and it will also show you what needs to be corrected.

8. Improve Your Blog’s Loading Times

Google now uses your site’s loading time as a factor for determining authority and placement in search results. The reason for this ties with their ultimate goal of providing the best user experience through search and a slow loading blog can scare readers away. To reduce your blog’s load times, ensure that you use a trusted and reliable web host, install the caching plugin, W3 Total Cache, use only necessary plugins and widgets and use a moderate amount of images on your blog.

source:bloggingpro

5 SEO Tips To Improve Web Visitor Traffic

Following are some SEO tips (Search Engine Optimization), which is suitable for beginners, and those who want to improve your visitor traffik.

1. Focus page

Each page should focus on a single keyword or keyword phrase. Your keywords should appear in the title, a title and a tag in bold on the page. You can be bold with each other or keyword phrases related to, but do not overdo it. Check the density of keywords on the page. There are many free online tools to check keyword density. Must be between 5% and 15%. If the density is higher than that and you run the risk that sanctions imposed by the search engine.

2. Select the appropriate title tags

Your title tag is first seen by the search engine spiders, so this is the most important SEO tools that you have. Your title should consist of only 1 thing – keywords from your page. Title tag is the text that will appear in the title bar of a web browser when someone visits your page. See the title on this page.

3. Design the site for visitors and search engines

Many experts to design the site or blog for visitors to the friendly and we do not need to worry with the search engine. Be sure to use ALT tags for all your photos. Avoiding the use of frames, flash and javascript.

4. Use unique content: Find unique content because search engines are like.

Do not fill the website / blog with this article, as found in an article of this site. It is fine to use some of them, but you must have content that is not found anywhere on the web. Ideally, all content on the main page must be unique because this is the first page of search engine will indexed it. But if you want some of the pages indexed for a particular keyword, then at least the top of the page contents must be unique.

5. Use the link back to the effective

Backlink’s from other website or blog when there is a link on the web page that link to your site. There are many ways to get backlinks (which is a topic for another article). Make sure that keywords in the text of the link. For example, if the link text “click here” link will not have weight in the eyes of the search engine and text links are considered “Cookie Recipes”.

Source: http://seoupdates.com/archives/tag/5

Search Engine Optimization: It’s The Little Things That Count

Building a search engine friendly site can seem like a daunting task, but there are some parts of search engine optimization process that are quite simple and quickly done. These seemingly simple tasks can make a big difference in the results you get in your efforts to attain top search engine positions. If you are in the process of building a new site take a look at the easily done optimization points explained below, and if you already have a site, you can use this list as a way to check your site.

1. Name your files properly. Just as it is important to put keywords in your meta tags and in the copy of your site, it is also very helpful to have keywords in the names of the files. If have a website for the Electronic Widgets Company, your “About Us” page could have the file name “aboutus.html” but then you would not have any keywords in it. It would be better to have “electronic-widgets-aboutus.html” or “about-electronic-widgets.html”. If you make a sub-directory also make sure that its name incorporates an important keyword. Never make a file such as “page1.hml” or “page2.html”, you are throwing away an opportunity to place your keyword.

Some people carry this point to the nth degree and choose a long domain name with many keywords put together. I don’t think you need to do this, as these kinds of domain names are difficult to remember. However if you are building a secondary domain, one that is content-rich and designed to get traffic which is then directed to another site, you can opt for a keyword-rich domain name.

2. Put your keywords in hyperlinks. Another important place for keywords is in the hyperlinks which lead to other pages on your website. If you have a navigation bar at the top or the left that is made of gif or jpeg images, you can add a text navigation bar at the bottom of the page and make sure that your keywords are in these text links. So, instead of having a text link that says “resources” it could better be written as “electronic widget resources”. Similarly whenever you find a place within the written text of the page where you can highlight a keyword and link it to another part of the site, take this opportunity. You can even make a hyperlink that jumps to a bookmark on the same page.

3. Make sure you have your own domain name. It is more difficult to promote an interior portion of a site, than the main domain name. It only costs from $8.00-15.00 to get a domain name, and your own web space can be obtained for as little as $100 per year. So, if you already have a site, but want to start a completely different product line, start a new site with a new domain name rather than set up a subdirectory of an existing site, or , worse, use a free site.

4. Use the alt tag for images. Here is another opportunity to place your keywords. Search engines cannot “see pictures” or graphic files. Whenever you have a graphic image you have the option of adding alt text. This alt text will be visible when surfers put their mouse over the images, but more importantly it will be visible to search engines. So instead of just having a photo of a widget, you can put a description with your important keywords. If you have a navigation bar with images, you can put descriptive text for each navigation item.

5. Make sure that you have a title tag for each page. This may seem like an obvious point, but have you ever reached a web page which had a title, visible in the blue strip at the top of the browser, that said “new page” or “untitled page”? In this case the person building the site forgot to put in the title tag. These kinds of pages are usually found on the inner pages of a web site, a place where many people, mistakenly, pay less attention. So check all of your pages, make sure that there is a title tag, and make sure that your keywords are in the title tag.

Courtesy: http://seoupdates.com/archives/2010/10/25/search-engine-optimization-its-the-little-things-that-count

7 predictions for SEO trends in 2011

Prediction #1. Demand for SEO Keeps Growing

The headline speaks for itself – the demand for SEO is growing. Everything – the information about SEO, search for SEO services, reviews of SEO products and services.
Even with negative effect that recession has done to the SEO industry, the demand keeps growing. Good news for everyone who is on the market – our market expands and this is a good time to join this market.

Prediction #2. Google is Major SEO Market

With due respect to other search engines for keeping the fight with big G, still ‘Google SEO’ search trend is obviously more powerful than other search engine’s SEO trends.
With the dominance of Google on the market of SEO searches obviously the most successful SEO strategies, tools and communities will keep their fight for high ranks in Google. And screenshots with Google page 1 and your site on a competitive keyword ranking #1 on Google page 1 – will be the most impressive evidence of SEO success.
WARNING: when checking the screenshots with Google page 1 ranks, make sure you can know how to easily verify the “validity” of this screenshot. More info on Google page 1 screenshot validation – in this post.

Prediction #3. Bye-Bye to Link Exchange

Being a powerful pusher of the whole SEO market in 2004-2005 link exchange (aka reciprocal link exchange) helped the whole industry of SEO to rise and expand. Now the demand in searches for link exchange is the lowest.
Whereas in general the topic of link building, backlinks and SEO companies that can do that – started to rise.

Prediction #4. Diversify and “Conquer”

Today it’s not enough to know 2-3 ways of doing SEO and backliks – the market is bursting out, the demand spreads on all niches. Market wants SEO in forum signatures, market wants, blog and site SEO, market wants video SEO and even social network SEO.
If your SEO company does not know how to do all that, the clients will leak away to the competitors.

Prediction #5. Google PageRank – Drops to 2004 Year

After introducing its system of ranking the “importance” of web pages with the help of PageRank factor Google has focused the attention of SEO and close-to-SEO world to it. It as so visual, so tangible, it was like a badge of SEO courage to get Google PR 4 or 5 or 6.
But now we can see that search interested slowly faded and got back to the level of 2004. It remains to be a playing factor, but not the one which is in the total focus of attention from SEO community.

Prediction #6. Social Marketing SEO – Burstout

The demand for social marketing is glorious. Forum marketing and article marketing are doing good, they enjoy stable and seasoned market demand. And social marketing jumps higher and higher all the time.
This is a lucrative market. The trend of social marketing SEO is definitely very promising. Big demand – big money.

Prediction #7. WordPress – SEO King of a Hill!

WordPress is definitely ahead of other popular blog platforms that is so closely associated with SEO.
The demand for WordPress SEO is even higher than for blog SEO in general!
This fact is a good proof how widely spread WP blog platform is these days. And these big numbers are huge market. Market of WordPress SEO is expanding, the charts above prove that. Big hunting for WP SEO clients opened and will increase in 2011.

source:freetrafficsystem