MarketfederationTech toys and cool gear

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

This is the official definition of SEO from Wikipedia. Now that we know what SEO is let’s start with actual blog optimization. We all want our blogs to rank high on Google because high ranking drives more traffic to our blog and more traffic means more money. There are numerous ways to optimize your blog and I can’t describe all of them here because it would took me a week to do that and after a week there would be three new SEO tricks on the market. It’s impossible to know all of them because every day you learn something new. Since this article is most suitable for beginners, let’s start off by optimizing your WordPress.

Page Title
Wordpress, by default, set your page title like this: Blog Name – Blog Archive – Post Title. This is not very useful because search engines use your page title as the result link in your SERP (Search Engine Result Page). It wouldn’t be convinient to get your blog name as a result on every search with different keywords. This way search engines get confused and don’t know if this is what the visitor is looking for so they put others, more relevant, pages before yours. There’s a way to fix this. Open your wordpress theme page and locate header.php. Edit it and find the line that says:

Replace it with:

Now your page title should be Post Title – Blog Name and your blog should rank higher than before.

Meta Keywords
Some people say meta keywords are not used by Google and Yahoo anymore to rank your blog but MSN sure does use them. What should you put in meta tags? Relevant keywords! Don’t spam your tags because it can do more harm than good. Choose keywords that best describe your blog and don’t repeat them more than twice. Locate your header.php and at the top find meta text. Somewhere in between those lines insert:

Fill those empty brackets with your text of choice. For keywords be sure to use words that are related to your blog content. If you write about cars don’t put sex and world of warcraft in there because it may cause reverse effects and Google may punish you for spamming your meta tags.

Permalinks
A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. WordPress knows three types of permalinks and it sets the ugly one by default. It looks like this:

http://marketfederation.com/?p=123

As you can see this is painful for your eyes because it’s so not readable, even not for you (the blog owner, one who writes blog entries) so don’t wonder why your visitors and search engines can’t figure it out. You need to change this immediatly! The second type of permalinks is:

http://marketfederation.com/category/sample-post/

Say you submit your article about car parts to a popular article directory. When somebody searches for car parts the website returns result in one page. What do you think people will more likely click, the first version of permalink or the second one? I think we all like to know what’s beyond the fence before we actually go there. The third, more sophisticated, version looks like this:

http://marketfederation.com/year/month/day/sample-post

You can see date included. This is what most of us bloggers use because it’s search friendly and just makes more sense, especially for readers. How can you do this in your WordPress? Log-in to your administration area and go to options. There you can find permalinks menu and chose the second option.

Apply the changes and you’re set!

Google Sitemaps
Sitemaps tool allows you to inform search engines of your URL’s that are ready to be crawled. With Google Sitemaps you tell google’s spider to index your blog more often and more thorough, you tell it how to view your blog. This is basicly an XML file containing your URL’s. How can Google Sitemaps benefit your blog?

- Keywords Ranking (see how your blog ranks for certain keywords)
- Page Analysis (see how googlebot crawls your blog)
- Robots.txt (see if you’re blog is blocking googlebot in robots.txt and fix it)
- Re-indexing (if you got banned from Google you can ask for another indexing, after you’ve removed errors)

How can you start using Google Sitemaps? First you will have to activate your Google Sitemaps account by logging in here, assuming you already have Google username and password. After you’ve activated your account go to arnebrachhold.de and download the plugin for wordpress. Now fire up Notepad and create two empty files. Save the first one as sitemap.xml and the second one as sitemap.xml.gz. Move those to your plugin directory and upload the whole thing to your FTP server. After you’ve successfuly uploaded Sitemap Generator CHMOD 777 to sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz and move up to public_html and CHMOD 777 that also. Now login to your administrator area and activate the plugin, then move to Options->Sitemap and click re-build text to re-build your sitemap or build it for the first time.

These four basic SEO tricks should help your blog rank higher but you’re still a long way from top ten in SERPs. That’s about it. This is for beginners so expect more detailed guides in the future.