SEO: Fine-tuning WordPress for SEO

The following are some basic tips on how to fine-tune your WordPress site to attain improved search engine results ranking.

Permalink Structure for URLs

• Permalink settings is located on Setting > Permalinks. The permalinks feature allows you to create custom URL structures for your WordPress content.
• Some SEO professionals believe that the first URL structure (http://example.com/the-post-name/) is better than the second URL structure (http://example.com/post-category/the-post-name/).
• To have a single-level URL structure for your blog posts:

• First, in the Permalinks WordPress panel, choose custom the Custom Structure option.

• Then in the input field beside it, use the following URL structure: /%postname%/.

• Once this option is set up properly, your URLs will appear like so: http://example.com/the-post-name/

Title Tags

• The <title> tag of your web pages is an important factor in SEO; all web pages should have a unique <title> tag.
• In search engine results, the value of the <title> tag is often displayed after a user performs a search. 
• By default, however, the <title> for your blog posts in WordPress is "Blog name » Post title," and search engine users probably wouldn’t find that very compelling to click on.
• For your WordPress site to get the most benefit out of its <title> tags, it should be altered by fronting-load keywords so that it can match with search terms that people use. This means having the post title come before the blog’s name.
• To change your <title> tags, I recommend installing the All in One SEO Pack plugin. This WordPress plugin will automatically set up your <title> tags, making them more SEO-friendly. You also have the ability to manually specify the title of each post.
• The All in One SEO Pack WordPress plugin is one out of the six WordPress plugins that this site uses.

Meta Tags

• Meta description tags provide short explanations of what a web page is about. In search engine results pages, these descriptions appear as excerpts of the web page. It’s ideal to incorporate keywords you would like to rank on in your meta description tags. However, do so in a human-friendly, non-spammy way.
• The description should optimally be between 150-160 characters, the limit of many search engines before the description is trimmed at the end.
• In WordPress, there’s no ideal way to automate the process of creating meta description tags. The best descriptions should be handwritten, and the previously mentioned All in One SEO pack will allow you to configure them for each post.
• You can also add meta keyword tags on your posts for relevant keywords and key phrases, but it should be mentioned that Google no longer takes meta keyword tags into account when determining search engine rankings.
• With that being said, they won’t hurt, and there are other search engines out there besides Google that might use meta keyword tags as a signal for ranking, so I still recommended adding keywords as a best practice.
• You can also add meta keyword tags in your blog posts via the SEO All in One Pack.

Use noindex Meta Tag for Duplicate Pages

• By default, WordPress has a few different ways to navigate to your content pages. Depending on the WordPress theme you’re using, you might end up with duplicate content, which is bad for SEO.
• For example, let’s say you have a WordPress category with the following URL: http://example.com/category/my-category. This same category page can be viewed through: http://example.com/my-category/. Not good. So how do you fix this?
• By using the noindex HTML meta tag, you can inform search engines not to index certain URLs, which then reduces the chances of your site being penalized in search engine rankings for duplicate content.
• The easiest way to do this is by using the All in One SEO pack plugin. In the plugin, you have the option to assign noindex for category, archive, and tag URLs.

Use HTML Headings Properly

• Using HTML heading tags (i.e. <h1>, <h2>, …, <h6>) to break up sections of lengthy blog posts and other content pages is a good way to make your content easier to read.
• It’s also regarded as a way to point out important keywords for web spiders as they may value these tags higher than other HTML text tags (such as <p> or <blockquote>).
• From an SEO perspective, <h1> is the most essential heading and should only be used once on a web page.
• The <h2> tags are next in the hierarchy, and you can have several of them on the page. Below each <h2> you can have several <h3> tags, and below each <h3> tag, you can have  several <h4> tags, and so on. This is a semantic way of structuring your content, kind of like a book outline.
• If you’re using a WordPress theme that you didn’t build yourself, look into the theme’s template files (such as header.php, single.php, post.php, home.php, and page.php) to ensure that built-in HTML markup follows good content structuring. If you did build the theme, double-check to make sure that you’re using good content structures.

Use an XML Sitemap

• An XML sitemap is a standard protocol used to create an index of a website’s pages to help search engines find pages to crawl and to give them a better understanding of the website’s structure.
• XML sitemaps are easy to create manually, but if you update your site with new content often, it might not be a good idea because you’ll have to constantly update your XML sitemap.
• Using the Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap of your WordPress website for you. It will even notify Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines that your XML sitemap has been updated.

References:

• http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/fine-tuning-wordpress-seo
• http://en.wordpress.com

SEO: Step 4 Page optimization

• Examine your website code and make sure you get your keywords as close to the beginning of your page as possible, preferably the in the first 100 words.

• Your goal is to put keywords towards the very beginning of your web page since search engines give those a much higher relevance.

• The rest of the page should have keywords near the middle and bottom as well.

• If you have JavaScript at the top of your web pages make sure you move them toward the end of your web pages, or better yet, create an externally linkable JavaScript file and place your code there.

• Make sure your website has a site map.

• A site map is a listing of all sections of a website with individual links to every page. The site map enables visitors to click on the site map links and move directly to a specific section on the website, which improves the site usability.

• Your site map should be linked from the home page as the site map assists crawlers in finding and indexing all of your pages and the home page is usually the first entry page to your site.

• Add a glossary of terms page for the most frequent industry keywords and their definitions.

• We have discussed in the competition research lesson how to find competing sites for your keyword phrases with the Google "define" command. Now it's time to gain some advantage for your own site by adding a glossary of terms page of your own.

• Check each page with the SEO Studio Keyword Analyzer to ensure you have achieved the desired concentrations of keyword density and prominence of keywords in each page compared to your competitors top ranking pages.

• Keep on repeating the optimization and tweaking process until you are satisfied with the Keyword Analyzer report.

• Inbound links to a website most often will have a far greater importance than perfectly optimized web pages.

• Don't fuss too much over the perfectly optimized web page, in our experience there is no such thing, as the engines are constantly changing their methods for scoring page content.

• Instead, focus your efforts on building content that other websites will naturally want to link to.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-4-page-optimization.aspx

SEO: Step 3 Site preparation

Search engines can only rank web pages that make it into their index. It's your job, as a webmaster to ensure every web page that is important to your site gets crawled by the search engines. This may mean website re-design for established websites with low search engine traffic. Look for the obvious signs of search engine spider obstacles such as frames, JavaScript navigation, or long URLs with session IDs. Once you have cleared the way for the search engine crawlers to reach every page on your site, focus your efforts on improving your site's usability.

• Use static text link navigation

• Static text links works best as internal linking with keywords embedded in anchor text create a powerful combination of page relevancy.

• Avoid frames

• As of today many engines are able to follow links within framesets, but it's best not to take any chances.

• Avoid flash

• Flash should be limited to important concept illustrations or special affects, but don't build a flash only website if you want to achieve high search engine ranking.

• Images should be not for navigation or embedded text.

• Search engines can't read text embedded in image objects.

• Unfortunately a lot of menu systems use a combination of JavaScript and rollover images.

• If you suspect your site uses this type of menu system, change it right away to either completely static link system or DHTML without the use of JavaScript.

• Dynamic content with well form URL re-written code

• Dynamic content and e-commerce website should ensure their product and category page URLs are not simply a number or some cryptic code, but a well formed URL re-written code.

• There is a built in URL re-writing engine in Linux based servers and there are many third party tools available for URL re-writing on IIS servers. The URLs can be reformatted so they contain the target keywords pertaining to the page.

• Not use JavaScript dynamic navigation menu but DHTML

• Use of JavaScript for navigation is strongly discouraged.

• Avoid overloading pages with heavy graphics and flash

• If you notice your site's bounce rate is very high it may be due to visitors getting impatient and leave before the pages load.

• Validated HTML pages

• Validate HTML tool is validator.w3.org.

• Strongly recommended CSS usage

• The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is strongly recommended to substantially reduce the size of your HTML pages. Wherever possible use CSS classes to make your HTML source code more readable and to reduce the ratio between text and HTML codes.

• No broken links and images

• Use a freely available link checker called Xenu to check your links regularly.

• Avoid image map

• Keep in mind the search engines are blind when it comes to image maps.

• Add site map

• A site map is a catalog of important links on a designated page.

• The link to each page ideally will have descriptive text.

• The number of links on a site map should not exceed 50 on a single page.

• If your site has more than 50 pages, you need to create additional site map pages within a new category.

• Add site search tool to your website

• Installing a site search tool on your website is great way to increase your site's usability and at the same time you can get into the minds of your visitors by seeing what they are searching for.

• The search keywords used in a site search could also be a warning sign that certain information on your site is not easily accessible.

• By regularly reviewing your website's search log, you can uncover potential usability problems. Our favorite website search tool is the  Zoom Site Indexer. This tools is MS Windows based and can easily index hundreds of web pages in minutes.

• Reliable hosting

• Reliable hosting is a key essential for well indexed website.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-3-site-preparation.aspx

SEO: Step 2 Competition research (Continue)

On-page and off-page competition analysis

• Search ranking factors are broken into "on" and "off" page factors. Checklist of what your competitors are doing right or wrong as we dissect each on-page ranking factor.

On-Page Factors (20%-30% Ranking Score)	How to find out?
Are there optimized, unique Title tags on every page with no more than 90 characters in the Title?	Use the Keyword Analyzer tool and retrieve the internal links.  Check individual pages for Title tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.
Does the Body text contain at least 250 words per page?	Check individual pages for Body tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.
Are headings used H1/H2/H3 effectively?	Check individual pages for Heading tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.
Are the internal links text based or Flash or Image based and do they contain the target keywords? Note:Image based links are the worst type of internal links you can use since the search engines can't read the text inside them.	Check individual pages for Image tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer and also check the source code for Image and Flash based navigation.
Are the keywords inserted in the file names, folder or the domain name?	Use the Keyword Analyzer tool to retrieve the internal links.  Check individual pages for Filename/URL optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.
Are related keywords found in the Body text to increase the lexical correlation between keywords?	Check individual pages for Body tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer and pay careful attention to the 1, 2 and 3 word phrase list.
Are the keyword repetition, proximity, and prominence appropriate in the Title and Body text?	Check individual pages for Body and Title tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer. The closer to the beginning the keywords appear the better optimized the page is.
Are there ALT tag attributes in images and links?	Check individual pages for the ALT image tag optimization by running the Keyword Analyzer.
Is the page size and code to text ratio appropriate?	Use the Keyword Analyzer tool to retrieve the internal links and compare the HTML page size to the number of words found in the body. Large page size and low word count indicates too many HTML tags without the use of CSS which can help to reduce HTML code clutter and size.
Are the website pages search engine friendly with no frames in the body or session IDs in the URLs?	Check individual pages for Frames and the URL by running the Keyword Analyzer.
Did the search engines index all the pages?	Run the Links Plus+ tool, and use the Check Indexed pages function to compare the number of retrieved pages.
Do the website main pages show recent updates?	Use the Keyword Analyzer tool to retrieve the internal links that show the last modified date. The more recent the modified dates are the fresher the website appears to the engines.
How many outgoing links can be found, and how closely related are they to the site?	Navigate to the site's resource or link page in your browser and check the outgoing links. Too many links on a single page may be considered a link farm by the engines.
Is there a site map on the site?	Check the site manually for the presence of a site map. Cataloging a website's most important pages is a great way to help the search engines to crawl your website.
What is the top level domain of the site (.edu/.org/.com/.ca/.co.uk.etc)?	Check the URL, .edu domains have an advantage over .com and other TLDs. Country level domains can compete better for geographically related keyword terms.

"On-page" analysis example

• Open the Keyword Analyzer

• Enter the website address into the URL text box

• Click on the Get Links button to retrieve the internal links from the main page and pay careful attention to the website Title and URLs in the links display windows. 

• Both page URLs and Title tags are both very important elements from an on-page optimization perspective.

• Every page has a unique Title tag. Don't make the mistake of putting the same Title tag on every page.

• Analyzing the competition's individual pages

• The keyword highlighting tool really helps to put the spot light on keyword placement and repetition within each HTML element.

• Google cuts the Title tag at approximately 60 characters and Yahoo! at 90, they have managed to place the most important keywords at the beginning of the Title.

• Analyzing your competitors' pages to build your keyword list

• SEO Studio can extract the most frequently used keywords from any web page easily and accurately.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-2-competition-research.aspx

SEO: Step 2 Competition research

Search engines and other online tools give us a great deal of insight into our competitor's online campaigns. Before jumping head first into the optimization of our sites, we should thoroughly understand what our competitors are doing online. At the same time, you should not overestimate your competitors ability to find the best suited keywords. You should practice due diligence and verify your competitors' keyword selection with the methods we have outlined in the Keyword Research lesson.

How can we define our competition?

• Search commands provided by Google allow you to assess your competition fairly accurately; command:keyword phrase.

• Finding the Anchor link text used by competitors (allinanchor)

• Use a simple query with our keyword phrase in quotation marks to asses the number of other pages competing for that exact keyword term(s).

• Google "allinanchor" command will find all the websites using the specified keyword phrase in internal or external link text (anchor text); allinanchor:second mortgage.

• Finding the Title tag used by competitors (allintitle)

• Google "allintitle" searches the title tag of web pages for the keyword phrase entered.

• Find related sites using Google's related command (related)

• Google "related" command returns a list of pages that Google thinks are related to your site and competitor's site.

• Use Google's "define" search command (defined)

• Google will show you all the websites that are considered valuable resources on those subject matter.

• Adding a glossary page containing your industry specific keyword terms and their definitions is a great idea.

• Spyfu is a free research tool for discovering the keywords and ads your competitors are using on Google.

• Google Alerts will send you email alerts based on your and competitor's keywords. This is a great way to find out what's being said about you and your competitors.

Keyword effectiveness index (KEI)

• According to Wordtracker, "the KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign."

• KEI value of 40 or higher considered very good and indicates a less competitive keyword phrase.

• KEI does not take into consideration, link popularity, PageRank, and a number of other "off-page" factors which contribute to high search engine ranking. Relying strictly on the KEI alone could greatly under or overestimate the competitiveness of a keyword. A much better and more accurate competition assessment tool is the Google "allinanchor, and "allintitle" commands.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-2-competition-research.aspx

SEO: Step 1 Keyword research (Continue)

Examples of good keywords selection practices

• Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.

• Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60%-80% of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.

• At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.

• Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes. 

• It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.

Grouping keywords

• Managing and optimizing a large number of keywords can be a daunting challenge and it requires grouping for logical mapping to specific web pages once our initial keyword research is completed.

• Every website has at least 5-10 "main keywords" which can answer this question: "What is this website about?" The rest of the keywords are called secondary keyword and will be some variation of those main keywords whether lexically related or directly stemmed from the main keywords.

• Types of keywords

• Main keywords

• Usually one-two words in length, and all the other keywords either stem from them directly or are lexically related phrases, misspelled, or plural forms.

• A few examples of main keywords phrases are: "loan,""real estate,""lawyer," "DVD,""cell phone" etc.

• Although trying to get high ranking for these terms would be a futile attempt, nonetheless they are still required to be inserted into a website's title, body text and many other potential HTML tags for effective optimization.

• Secondary keywords

• These are the keyword we really try to get top ranking for on the search engines; therefore, they require the most amount of research and filtering. The secondary search phrases are either stemming from the main terms or semantically related in singular and plural forms.

• Usually 2-3 words in length, but they can be as long as 6 words in some cases.

• A few good examples of secondary keyword phrases are: "home equity loans," "low down payment loan mobile home," "best refinance home mortgage loan rate," "prepaid us sim cards," "international sim cards."

Long tail keywords

• If you had your choice of visitor traffic originating from the search engines, which scenario would your choose?

• One thousand visitors from one keyword?

• One thousands visitors from one thousand keywords?

• Targeting a few very popular keywords could bring to your site thousands of visitors a day, but at the same time you would be facing some very stiff competition. The more popular a keyword phrase is, the more optimization and link building effort is needed to achieve top ranking. So there is a trade off between choosing less competitive phrases with lower traffic vs. more popular keywords with higher difficulty levels to attain top ranking.

• Some SEOs prefer to target a few very popular keywords to get the greatest bulk of their traffic while others prefer to focus on many low competition keywords for an almost guaranteed top ranking. Also most SEOs recommend webmasters new to search engine optimization to target Long Tail keywords because it's easier to rank well in a short period of time.

• Long Tail keywords may be only searched a few times a month, but given a few hundred of these keywords, they can deliver a decent amount of highly targeted traffic.

• When you are just starting out it can be a great confidence booster to see the first few visitors trickle in from the search engines using Long Tail keywords.

• Long Tail phrases have a very tight focus, which makes them more targeted than highly popular broad keyword phrases and usually convert better. For example the keyword "golf shoes" might bring in thousands of visitors a day to a website specializing in golf shoes, but if someone searching for a specific brand and model like "men's air accel classic golf shoes" there is a higher chance of sale resulting from the search.

How do you discover Long Tail keyword phrases for your own site?

• Most of the mainstream keyword research tools such as the free Google external keyword tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keywords Analyzer, and Wordze are a good place to start, but you also have to find some other not so obvious ways to search for Long Tail keywords.

• SEOdigger.com keyword spying tool is definitely a must have tool.

• Google suggest guess what your searching for and gives you suggestions in the form of an auto-complete search box. 

• When the user types a query into the search box the program saves the query in the database. This is a true gold mine of Long Tail keyword phrases.

• Zoom Site Indexer inexpensive MS Windows based site indexing and search tool.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-1-keyword-research.aspx

SEO: Step 1 Keyword research

Selecting the best search terms is the first and most important step in optimizing your website. The keyword selection process could be defined as the art of expanding and the science of narrowing your keyword list down to the most relevant keyword terms that bring targeted visitors to your site. If you want to grow the number of visitors to your site month after month, you need to continue searching for new keywords within your website's topic relentlessly. Once you have exhausted the conventional keyword research tools and ideas online, start looking at magazines, newspapers, trade publications, consumer advocacy publications and even your junk mail folder.

Thinking like your customers

• The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing.
• There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind boggling.
• Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages. This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily the SEO Studio Keyword Analyzer tool can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.

Where and how to look for keywords

In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:

Brainstorming

• Don't just settle for asking the obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this product made up of?" or "Who is using my services?,"or "What problems my products solve?"

Paid keyword research tools

• Paid keyword research tools such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keywords Analyzer, and Wordze. They give you the crucial keyword popularity data that is necessary for any keyword research.
• Recommend free keyword research tools such as Free Wordtracker, and Free Keyword Discovery tools.
• If you do decide to sign up for the paid version, finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.

Free keyword research tools

• Free Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search numbers.
• Another very valuable feature iis the "Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web pages.
• Overture keyword inventory Yahoo! is promising a replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising

• Finding and selecting the best performing keywords based on the click through rate (CTR) and conversion rates.
• One of the fastest and most effective ways to select relevant keywords since your target audience is already casting their votes in the forms of clicks for your site.
• Testing new keywords with PPC is a very effective and low cost method to validate new keywords before incorporating them into your web page.

Ask your friends and colleagues

• People who know much less about your business can give you important clues as to how they would look for your products or services.

Related search terms suggestion tools

• One of the fastest ways you can find hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools.
• Creating a large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is essential to effective keyword research.
• Discovering related phrases that are not simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent indexing.
• Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as well. For example a computer shopper typing "apple" into the Google search box expects to see Apple computer in the results, but someone interested in finding information on the fruit apple, expects to find information on different varieties of apples and apple growers. It's the semantic latent indexing that helps connect documents to the correct meaning of the search results and it's believed to be widely used by Google.

Related search command list in search engine

• Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the "clusters" side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with different combination of keywords.
• Try Technorati a well known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags" section directly under the search results.

Visitor statistic reports

• Uncover new keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find your websites.

Regional keywords and dialects

• Use keywords as geographical filters. There can be variations of keywords from country to county even in the English speaking world.
• For example, in North America, we may use the term "search engine optimization" but in the UK and Australia most web searchers will be using "search engine optmisation"

Misspellings, hyphenated and plural

• Multitude of additional keywords to target.
• Search engines can suggest the correctly spelled or hyphenated keywords in response to your query request, but they can not change what people actually search for.

Site search engines

• Great source of new keywords and a potential data mining source.
• As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords, keyword length and other important keyword metrics.

Spy on top ranking competitors

• SEO Studio keyword analyzer can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page content in seconds.
• SEOdigger.com is a great tool that lets you enter your competitors' URLs and within seconds you'll have hundreds of keywords in front of you with sortable Wordtracker and Overture keyword popularity data.
• Spyfu.com identify PPC competitors and the keyword they use to advertisem, which keywords each website buys and you can even track it to the individual pages.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-1-keyword-research.aspx

SEO: Quality guidelines

Basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Reference: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3

SEO: Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
• Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
• Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Google's goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.
• Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let's Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

Reference: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#2

SEO: How to submit Blogger's sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool

Easy steps to submit Blogger's sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool.

• Go to Google Webmaster Tool dashboard.
• Click on your blog address.
• Click on "Site Configuration" > "Sitemaps" left navigation menu.
• Click on "Add Sitemap" button.
• Add each of the following codes:

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=2001&max-results=500
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=2501&max-results=500
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=3001&max-results=500

rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500
rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=2001&max-results=500
rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=2501&max-results=500
rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=3001&max-results=500

Reference: http://helplogger.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-to-submit-your-blogger-sitemap-to.html

SEO: Happy Read Day Sitemap

SEO: How to create sitemap

Sitemap is an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.

Here is simple steps to create sitemap on your blog.

• Create new post.
• Input page title as Sitemap.
• Input HTML code to content area by changing from "http://ibabyboom.blogspot.com" to your blog's URL.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

<script style="text/javascript" src="http://scriptabufarhan.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/daftarisiv2.js"></script>

<script src="http://happyreadday.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary?max-results=9999&alt=json-in-script&callback=loadtoc"></script>

Reference: http://busuk.org/ping/view/61814

SEO: Design and content guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/submityourcontent.
• Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Review our recommended best practices for images and video.

Reference: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

SEO: What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines.

All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users.

Let take 3 minutes watch video introduction to search engine optimization.



 Reference: http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

SEO: What is Google Adsense for search?

Google Adsense for search is a free product that lets you to place a Custom Search Engine on your site to provide users with web search. You'll also earn revenue from relevant ads on the search results page.

Google Adsense for search offers you the following:

• Choosing the content your users search: your site, a collection of sites you choose, or the entire web. You can also prioritize and restrict search to specific sections of sites.
• Customization of look and feel - you choose the colors, location of the ads, and the option to host the results on your site or have Google host them for you.
• Monetization of search results pages with targeted ads.

Reference: https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=9879

SEO: How to promote your blog for free

Here is the list of network to boost up your blog's traffic for FREE. If you would like to appear in the list, please contact us or leave your comment below.

Facebook

• Get Facebook page for your blog.
• Get friends or fans to click "Like" and "Share" your post.

Google

• Add your blog and your recent blog posts to google; http://www.google.com/addurl.

Google Blog Search

• Search for new blog posts and add comments to them. This is to be the first comment on the post.

Twitter

• Get Twitter account for your blog.
• Auto link twitter to your blog. So message gets send out to your Twitter followers every update on your post.

Twitter Feed

• Get Twitter Feed account to automatically publish your post on social networks; e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.

Yahoo Answers

• Search for topics related to your blog and answer peoples' questions with blog's link.

Reference: http://blogoola.com/blog/101-free-ways-to-promote-blogs

SEO: Google Adsense tips for beginners

• Always select "text/Image ads" option when you create an ad unit. This might increase your revenue.

• Always keep minimum one ad in the first half of your site/blog. Meaning your page visitor should see the ad without scrolling till the end of the page.

• Never ever click on your own ads. Once Google disable your account, you will never be able to get back to Adsense program.

• Don't keep too many ads on the same page. Google gives you a limit for this 3 ad units, 3 link units and 2 search boxes in one page. We suggest you not to use the maximum limit. Because too many ads will make your web page look cluttered.

• Try to match your ad units color theme with your web page's color theme. But don't confuse visitor by placing the ad units between some links.

• Don't use 'CLICK HERE' buttons or a text near Google ad units.

• Don't try to edit ad unit's HTML scripts.

Reference: http://adprogramsinblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/google-adsense-tips-for-beginners.html

SEO: How to increase your blog's earning with Google Adsense

• Determine blog's primary focus.

Google Adsense ads are most effective on blogs that provided specific topics. Consider how you can make your specific contents to attract specific types of readers and ads.

• Write consistent and focused content.

Google serves ads based on the content on each of your pages. Write consistently and focused on a specific topic to increase the likelihood that Google will display ads on your blog that your readers are apt to click on.

• Increase blog's traffic.

The more visitors to your blog, the more potential for clicks on your Google Adsense ads. Work to drive traffic but make a concerted effort to find traffic that adds value to your blog.

• Research and write higher paying keywords.

Google serves ads through its Adsense program based on keywords. Some keywords are more popular than others and therefore, drive higher bids. If you're writing about topics related to higher paying keywords, you're likely to earn more money from Google Adsense.

• Design Google Adsense positions.

Design positions on your blog to determine which work best in generating click-throughs and maximum revenue.

Reference: http://weblogs.about.com/od/monetizingablog/ht/GoogleAdSenseTp.htm

SEO: Difference between Google Adwords and Google Adsense

The Google AdWords program enables you to create advertisements which will appear on relevant Google search results pages and our network of partner sites. To learn more about AdWords and begin advertising immediately, please visit www.adwords.google.com.

The Google AdSense program differs in that it delivers Google AdWords ads to individuals' websites. Google then pays web publishers for the ads displayed on their site based on user clicks on ads or on ad impressions, depending on the type of ad.

SEO: What is Google Adsense?

Google AdSense is a way to rent out your online real-estate and make money. Your online real-estate could be a personal website, a blog, or just articles that you write on online site.

By placing specific targeted ads on your content pages, you can earn money while giving your visitors information. The type of ads that Google gives you are many - textual, image, search options, and video.