Photo courtesy - Somma

Here is a compilation of all the search engine optimization tips for bloggers ( Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and other platforms) featured here on DailySEOblog. Bookmark this page and you can refer to them any time - honestly quite some of them are really good tips particularly catering to Google, which are not featured elsewhere. Some of them are basic SEO stuff, you may want to have a look.

Importance of primary and secondary keywords - What are primary and secondary keywords? Why should you select them, and how they will help you rank high on search engines.

Five sure shot tweaks to rank high on Google - Must read for bloggers - The top 5 things you should do to ensure high ranks on Google. Only the relevant SEO tips for Google.

How interlinking your pages will help you rank higher on the SERPs - Importance of interlinking, why and nhow should you interlink your pages so that the google bot catches it.

Optimize your Wordpress categories to avoid duplicate content - Wordpress creates a lot of duplicate content by default. Here are tips on how you can reduce it.

Create a user-navigation sitemap for your blog - Crawlers like it - Sitemaps are not only for crawlers, here is how you can create a manual sitemap with ease.

How to avoid duplicate content on Wordpress? - All the tips you need to know on avoiding duplicate content on Google.

User server location advantage to rank high on Google - If you are hosting a website, did you know that the location of your server will help you gain edge on regional search engines?

Optimize the robots.txt file for Wordpress, allow your blog to rank high - Robots.txt is an often ignored file, which is actually an excellent tool that will help you get more files indexed on google and thus rank high. Here ate the tweaks.

Create and submit a sitemap for Yahoo - Sitemaps are different for each search engine, here’s how you can create a sitemap customized for Yahoo in easy steps. 

Tweak title tags of your blog to rank high - Title tags are very important to get search engines attention. here are tips on how you should write an attractive title.

Highlighting your content with a SEO friendly layout - Having great content is not enough. Here are tips on how to decorate it to cater to the spiders.

Importance of footer text in SEO - Footer text is an ignored element which can be used effectively to feed information to the search engines.

How to build a sitemap for large websites and blogs - Building a sitemap for a small blog or site is easy. But if you have a large website, it turns messy. Learn how you can still get a great sitemap ready without mess.

Importance of allinanchor text - Why is allinanchor text and how you should take care of them.

What are supplementary results? Do they affect you? - Everyones, night mare once upon a time.

5 vital SEO stats that you should keep track of - If i were to suggest you 5 SEO metrics that you should constantly keep track of so that you can keep your positions in tact, here are they.

Does Google page rank affect your rankings? - Google page rank is often given more importance than what it actually deserves. Read this article to study the facts.

Importance of incoming links - Why is an incoming link important and how they will help you rank high.

Keyword usage in site content - facts and myths - How should you use keywords in your site content. Do’s and dont’s.

How to SEO on an Ajax-ified site? - When your site is AJAX-ful SEO becomes tough, but here’s how you can effectively harness the power of AJAX as well as SEO together.

How image ALT tags helps you to rank high - Why should you use image ALT tags, where you should use and how?

Flash and SEO - moving together the web2.0 times - How to optimize pages in flash.

Creating SE friendly post titles - What is the importance of titles, how should you write titles to get the edge over other blogger who has the same content.

How to get indexed by Google in 48 hours - Getting indexed on Google is not easy, but here’s a tip that will ensure you indexing in 48 hours or less.

Selecting keywords for SEO - What are keywords and what keywords should you select for your blog?

SEO friendly layout - Ensuring a SEO friednly layout will help you rank high on search engines automatically. See what factors makes your blog SEO friendly.

Got a doubt on SEO? Post it to me HERE. I'll try and answer it asap. :) -- Mani

Well, if you are on wordpress things are easy. Number of users accessing internet through their mobile phones are increasing these days and all major portals and search engines have already converted their blogs to mobile friendly versions. Bloggers today stand at a point where there are lot of archives and it’s going to be a tedious task to convert all the pages to a mobile friendly version. But thanks to al the mobile plugins available on wordpress, that it’s easy than we thought it would be. Here are some great plugins that I found will help us in making the blogs mobile compatible.

• Wordpress mobile edition plugin by Alex King
  WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
• Wordpress to PDAplugin by Imthiaz Rafiq
  This plugin helps the users to view your blog in a pda browser.
• Wordpress on WAP plugin by Lester Chan
  Enables you to browse your WordPress’s blog entries on a WAP enabled mobile phone.
• Wordpress mobile plugin from Andy Moore
  This plugin helps you to convert your wordpress blog to a mobile friendly format.
• Make your WP blog mobile friendly and earn money too
  This plugin is a enhanced version of Alex’s plugin, were some cool features are added making your blog more compatible for mobiles.

So those are the best plugins around that will help you make your wordpress blog mobile friendly/compatible. There are a few more plugins around but those are basically a rip off from either of the above plugins, mainly Alexs one. I hope it works fine for all of you.

Photo courtesy bojassem

You blog I blog. Okay, all of us are the same ( well almost! ). We use readers, subscribe, draft, post, publish, link edit and blog. Yet, some are popular, some are Z-listers, some A list, some in-between, some spam some gurus, some are bald ( No not him! ) while some are superman like . Why the differences?

There are two ways of doing it buddy. 1) Hard Work and 2)Smart work

If you ..
- Spent hours together searching for topics on the net to blog about
- Post articles regularly and try to get online everyday to post articles
- Do not write anything negative about any blog/product
- Create original articles
- Spent most of the time looking at your statistics and not commenting on other blogs

You probably fall into the first category a hard working blogger.

But if you ..
- are impulsive and find topics just like that on any topic
- draft articles and publish it with time stamp edited
- write about your disagreements and honest opinion about products or other blogs
- rather than creating completely original articles, get inspired from others posts (while crediting them for it)
- spent more time commenting on other blogs and not your statistics

You’d fall in to the second category - Smart blogger.

I’m unsure which one is better. Sometimes, i prefer the smarties are like John Chow, but when they have a problem with Google, i think the hard working types are. Whatever it is - being consistent and connecting to your audience is the name of the game. Just that there are two ways of doing it. Which one are you and are you comfortable that way?

Photo courtesy Jamesgrayking

No.This is not one of those cliche articles. And I’m not talking about getting subscribers by writing great content, or getting more links etc.. C’mon who doesn’t know those points? We are looking for something new. Right?

I’m talking about that one trick that will increase your subscriber list atleast by 10% over night. Guaranteed.

So you have an RSS feed set for your blog already right? How do you manage it? Feedburner? Great!

If you log in to your feed burner account here, you’ll find a list of email subscribers by clicking on the “See more about your subscribers” link. These are the number of people who are subscribed for your daily updates on email. I don’t know about you but for me they constitute 40% of my total subscription. Rest of the subscribers use an RSS reader/browser to read my feeds.

Today we’ll work on the number of email subscribers. In the dashboard(feedburner), take the email subscribers details(Manage email addresses link). It will show you the email addresses that are subscribed to your updates. Also just next to the email, it also lists is an email address is verified or not. See screenshot for reference.

Now, you can export this email list in CSV format(see link on the same page.)and download it to your computer. Open the downloaded file in Excel and sort the addresses based on whether they are verified or not. ( If you just have a couple of emails. you can do it manually ). Now select the unverified emails. These are the emails that have subscribed to your feed but unfortunately missed the verification part of the process.

Now, select your favorite Email application, like Gmail or Outlook and draft a mail for these unverified email subscribers. Make the email sound attractive and personal - so that it won’t be counted as spam when they reach the targets inbox.

Write a beautiful email that prompts the reader to do the verification part. You can request them to search for the verification mail, by giving your email id from which the email would have been sent. This is the same email that’s given to feedburner in it’s settings.
Also, gently remind them that this(verification part) might have been missed, and they still have a chance to subscribe. Also it may be a good idea to let them know of any recent improvements in the blog.

I found this trick very effective and was able to increase my subscription count overnight. The best part is that most subscribers immediately accepted my reminder email, and apologized for not verifying the subscription. So how’s that idea? Go ahead - Increase your subscribers count overnight!

Photo courtesy psoup216

Everybody’s asking for it - time and again. It’s one of the most frequently asked questions at forums, conferences and blogs. I researched on the topic and found that most of the times it’s the same things that are repeated.

• Create compelling content
• Announce competitions
• Participate in carnivals
• Link to others
• Target a niche
• Blah blah blah..

I decided to bookmark all those top posts on “how to increase traffic and comments on your wordpress blog”, so that I can refer to one each time.

- 10 techniques to get more comments on your blog - Problogger

- How to get more comments - Blog Herald

- How to get more comments on your blog - DP forums

- Is it hard to get comments? - Blog Catalogue

- How to get more comments? Instigator blog

- 10 tips to attract more comments - Performancing

- How to get more comments? Webhosting UK forums

- How to get traffic to your blog - Seth Godin

- How to build traffic to your blog - Webpronews

- 10 remarkably effective ways to get traffic - SEOMoz

- Increase traffic to your blog from search engines - SEguide

Although there were lot of junk out there - these are the best posts on the topic. All of these posts speak from the webmasters experience and are not those “yet another post” kind of thing.Hope you enjoy all of them.

Finding images to post alongside your article can be quite a tedious task. Many rely on Google images search or windows live search(which has come out really well in it’s revamped interface).

There are lot of websites that are online repositories of stock photography and provide free stock photos/images for non-commercial use. Here are a list of them.

1. Freefoto
   Available for personal use.Almost 100,000 photos online for download, free.
2. FreePixels
   This site offers free vector art for personal and commercial use. Tons of images available online.
3. Pictures from old book
   This is super cool one! It’s got scans of pictures from old books.Free for use.
4. Freerange Stock
   This site has lots of well organized, catalogued versions of free hi-resolution images for non commercial use.
5. Image Temple
   Free hi-resoultion images for personal use.Pretty impressive collection.
6. One Odd dude
   Collection of free hi-res stock photos and backgrounds for personal use. no commercial use.
7. Font play free photos
   This is regularly updated collection of free hi-res stock photos, both for commercial and personal use.
8. Woophy
   This is a great resource. Good collection of images based on location.
9. Free media Goo
   Site offers free image that can be used both for commercial and non-commercial use.
10. Graphic Maps
    Collection of flags and maps that can be used free for personal and commercial purposes.

Google penalizes blogs and sites for a number of reasons. John Chow is the recent victim. He was taken off the google index recently for doing something that violated Google webmaster guidelines.

John had been running his “Link to me - to get linked back” scheme, whereby if you write a small review on his blog and link to him with the anchor text,”Make money online”, he would link back to you. Many bloggers linked to him and got linked back from John.

Now that John Chow is kicked out of Google Index, what does it mean to other bloggers who have linked to him?

Google says it clearly in it’s guidelines that -

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.

So that means anyone who linked to John Chow is going to get the penalty this Google PR update. Yikes! Are you one of those?

Does it affect John Chow?

Nope. The man had made the blog hugely popular and enjoys a steady source of traffic.He’s even declared that banning from Google has done no detrimental effects on his income.

Does it affect you?

If you’ve linked to John, and he’s linked back - well yes may be. Only this Google PR update will tell you.

So what are the things that I shouldn’t do to get a bad reputation with Google?

Yeah, the guidelines are a bit boring to read through. so let’s me list out the most overlooked things by most of the people.

1. Choose a good server that has no downtime - Google does not like servers that has frequent downtimes. Worse - when the Google bots visit your site, if your server is down, they flag you red!
2. Don’t do those black hat SEO stuff like keyword stemming, cloaking, doorway pages etc.
3. Don’t use a hosting that has a shared IP of a banned user on Google - Google may think you’re friends?
4. Too much similar anchor text linking to you - Google guesses it out that you’ve done something artificial to get those links, hence banned.
5. Stupid link building campaigns - Like John’s stay away from them. They are temporary.

Since the Google PR update is nearing, make sure that your blog is safe of these troubles. Remember, no matter how huge or popular you are - if you are not white hat and genuine - Google is going to get you one day - once and for all!

So you started blogging only months back and already feeling bored with no backlinks, no popularity and no recognition? Think again.

For the blogging legends, success did not happen overnight. It took them years of posting, consistency, knowledge sharing and socialization(just to name a few) to make it big today. Ask anyone of those celebrity bloggers - they don’t live in vacation homes nor do they spend evenings sipping whiskey and wine in their yachts. They’d probably be writing a new post sipping a coffee.

I did a research on the top blogging legends on their initial days of blogging. I thought I’d find something interesting in these posts since they would be their best of all time.But not really. Many of them were on the usual - “How to get popular” and “how to get discovered” topics.(Yes just like you!) See for yourself.

1. Problogger - Darren Rowse, Sep 23 -2004
   Page rank explained was Darren’s first post, where he writes about what google page rank is. Google PR is one of the hot favorites of bloggers even today.
2. Labnol - Amit Agarwal, Jan 01 - 2005
   Amit writes about travel directions to get to India. He offers the route maps available online in his first blog article.
3. John Chow.com, Dec 31 - 2005
   John wrote his first post about how the year 2005 went(No link-sorry) and what he’s going to do in 2006. No making it top to the make-money-online bandwagon was not in his checklist. Instead it was - “Make This Blog Into Something Worth Reading”
4. Seth’s blog - Seth Godin, Oct 01 -2006
   Seth’s first posts was about effective speech.
5. Blogoscoped - Philip Lenssen, Dec 01 -2003
   Philips wrote first on Carl and Keyword stemming way back in Dec 2003. I was at college then
6. How to change the world - Guy Kawasaki, Oct 02 -2006
   Guy Kawasaki’s first post on his experience in returning from Mumbai after the IBM conference.
7. Kottke - Jason Kottke, March - 1998
   Kottke wrote his first post on what’s hyper text?
8. Micropersuasion - Steve Rubel, Oct 01-2006
   Steve started off with a bunch of links?

Interesting common factors

- Most of them started off with something “seemingly” silly.
- All of them were consistent with posting regularly.
- Most of them had either very less or no comments at all in the early posts.
- Most of them wrote on posts that were already covered by someone else.
- Most of them linked a lot to other resources.

The above posts were “discovered” from the blogs archive sections, (who ever featured it.) and it could be wrong. If you have better information please let know.

Now, upload your images to Imageshack, and post it directly to your blog through the Wordpress dashboard, while writing a post.

He did it first with the Google Sitemap plugin. Arne has brought out another plugin for wordpress that will enable you to upload the images to imageshack instead of your host. It’s an easy to use plugin currently supported by Wordpress 2.1

He says -

This plugin allows you to upload images from your WordPress post screen and to insert them with the thumbnail into your post with a few clicks.

Download the plugin here

Advantages
- Easy to use.
- Save on server space and bandwidth.
Dis Advantages
- Imageshack may be banned in some countries - so your blog images may not show up.
- Since imageshack does not provide user account(like picasa or Flickr), if you don’t save the urls, the image cannot be traced if lost.

But it is a handy plugin for bloggers who post more images in their posts. Using images extensively will eat up your bandwidth and server space.This one’s a redeemer.

There are millions of options and you have only seconds to make a decision. Every internet surfer has a time bomb attached to his head while surfing.
You waste your time on a slow website, and you are missing valuable information on another website.

So nobody wants to wait for information, if you don’t provide it, there are other better sites that will provide the same or better information.
This makes it crucial for every blogger to optimize his pages, so that the information a surfer is searching is delivered within no time.

- Images.
Images are crucial. You can’t take them off completely.Ensuring that the images that appear on your page are of low file size and is optimized for web, will bring down the page load time drastically. You can make sure that your images are optimized using photoshop.
Open the image in photoshop and select Save> Save as optimized and it will give the best option to save the image suitable for web.

Replacing CSS with images images with CSS, is a better option to bring down your page load time. many of the tabs, buttons etc can be easily replaced in a more professional and clean looking way using CSS.

- Tables.
Many Wordpress templates uses tables in it’s code. nothing wrong but too many tables can increase your page load time and increase the size of your code.Try to code without tables and replacing them with CSS.It helps in bringing down the page load time.

- Scripts.
Scripts from other sources are a major factor in increasing page load time for blogs. Since all of us use lot of third party addons like Mybloglog, Directory buttons, Technorati buttons, Widgets etc - all of these widgets call javascript from their own websites which increase the page load time drastically. If possible, cut down on the number of widgets, and keep only the essential ones. Otherwise, don’t put all of them on the index page at least.

- Video Ads.
Vide ads are a hot favorite these days.There are many video ads available, but unfortunately, they increase the page load time very much.
To beat it - try to place the ads in the lower end section of the template. please don’t place them at the header or top part of the template.In such a case, the content will display only after the video is loaded - on dial up connections. This will screw up the user-experience.

- Youtube videos.
Another element what’s very commonly used among bloggers. Though YouTube videos are optimized for quick loading, placing one video each in every post is a big mistake. If you post one youtube video on each post(at various times) then it all ends up on the index home page, on all the posts.This will make things horrible, forget about page load time, it gives more than one option to the user and it will confuse them.So make sure that out of all the posts that appear on the index page,only one video appears.If you have set 4 posts to appear on the home page, let there be one youtube video in every 4 posts - not more than that.

- Flash Content.
Flash is becoming less popular these days but, there are blogs that use small flash elements on the header and side templates. Very bad.As an SEO, i hate flash elements, because they only present visually appealing elements which does not work for visitors(though they are appealing to you).They are not SEO friendly and should be avoided from the template if possible.Worse, they increase the page load time by double.So cut them off your template and keep it minimal.

So, keep these elements on your template to a minimum and rely more on CSS where ever possible, so that your visitors find it easy and a pleasant experience to navigate/use the site.

If you are wondering how to find the page load time of your site or blog, here is a cool tool that will help you find it element by element.It shows how each element of your page template affects your page load time on each internet connection speeds. If you are using a T1 connection, then this post may not look useful for you but before deciding, try accessing your blog on a dial up connection. Because that is the real testing ground.If the blog takes time on a dial up connection - you need to use this tool and trim down those frills.