Mar
10
Filed Under (News) by Mani Karthik on 10-03-2008

Have you been waiting to advertise your blog/service on other websites but never could possibly do it because of the high rates in advertising?

Do you have a kickass service or product that you want to show off to others?

Are you a freelancer who wants to get some business and get people to know you?

Here’s a golden chance to grab some ads at damn cheap rates on DailySEOblog ! Being March, which is not the best time of sales, I thought a giveaway at really cheap prices would really help both me and the advertisers alike.

The 125×125 ads on DailySEOblog have been sold for USD 70 per month untill now. This whole month and April, the ad spots will be available for USD 30 per ad. Yes, you read that right. Just 30 bucks for a premium placement !

Also, there is the option for advertising your blog/product/service to around 600 tech savvy readers daily for just USD 20 !!

What do you get?

Place your ad on RSS feeds and let all the potential clients know and talk about your blog/product. All that for just 15 bucks!

Target a tech savvy crowd of search engine experts by placing your logo and introduce your service to them for as low as USD 30 per month.

Here are the new discounted rates !

  • 125×125 image ads on the sidebar - USD 30 per ad, for 30 days.Your logo will remain on the most viewed part of the blog, not to mention the traffic and the clicks.
  • Ads on the footer of RSS feeds - USD 20 for two weeks reaching 600 readers daily.

So make your mind now. Now or never. Make use of this discount and get that extra mileage and same success rates for even less than half the usual rate.

Wise men make quick decisions! ;)

Order a 125×125 ad for USD 30

SEO Blog-pixel

Order a RSS feed ad for USD 20

SEO Blog-pixel
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Mar
04

I’m delighted to introduce to you - a new SEO friendly wordpress theme from DailySEOblog - “SEO Green” !

We’ve been working on this theme for quite some time now, and after a lot of modification and tweaks, here it is. We’ve managed to make it SEO friendly as much as possible, along with keeping the looks and feel of a contemporary wordpress theme.

Longscreenshot

This is a free wordpress theme, so feel free to download it and use tweaking it according to your taste.

What is so special about the theme?

The simplicity and effectiveness.

The theme is designed keeping in mind the common blogger who is on the look out of a wordpress theme that he can implement once and the forget about. This is for those bloggers who don’t want to think too much and crash their brains about optimizing their site.

The categories

The categories are put right on the top of the theme. Now, this is something unusual. You either find the categories on the right hand side or on the top bar header navigation menu. The reason they are put on the top is that you have a good real estate for doing SEO here. Make your categories SEO friendly by using keywords in them and even otherwise your categories are picked up by the search engines by default. Therefore highlight is on the categories, so you may want to tweak them and make them really attractive.

The meta tags

There are no meta tags by default on the theme. Simply because, they have no SEO value at all. Instead I’m using the categories to appear at the description on the SERPs. Once you install the theme, the description text that appears for it on Google would be the categories.

Now, for those who have lot of categories, this may look as spam on the SERPs. For those bloggers I recommend the headspace plugin to be added to the theme and everything regarding the meta content will be sorted out.

It is a common mis-understanding that the meta tags gets you lot of SEO importance while the truth is that it does not (apart form the titles). It does serve the purpose of an Ad-copy that compels people to click on your site while it is appearing on the SERPs.

The Header

The header has a logo to the left and the recent comments and the recent posts listed on it. To the right, you’ll find the subscription options. The recent comments and posts plugin is used here keeping in mind that the header should contain as much content as possible to be absorbed by the spiders. I could’ve easily left it blank, but there was a good real estate for SEO, so I thought it might be wise to just use it.

screen-top 

The logo space can also be customized according to your taste, just replace the image logo.jpg in the template directory to get this done.

screen-logo1  
screen-logo2  

 

The Footer

The footer has three columns that are very much “tweakable”. The first column contains an about me section where you can add text about you or the site, while adding a photo or logo of yours. The second and third column can be customized to add links, external or internal depending on your taste. 

screen-footer

 

Essential Plugins

- The theme comes packed with the recent comments and recent posts plugin, please activate it from the the Dashboard> Plugins menu.
- For those who want custom titles and meta info, I recommend you use the HeadSpace2 plugin.
- Any other plugin can be easily added to the right hand sidebar. A demo of plugins working can be seen here.

About the author

The theme is designed by my partner designer Prasanth, who have coded the entire code himself, while I bugged him with the SEO metrics.Prasanth helps me with design on my SEO projects.

Demo ~ Download theme

If you’ve spotted any errors on the theme, please let me know on the comments. I’ll very much appreciate it.Hope you’ll enjoy the theme as much as we liked designing it.

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Feb
23
Filed Under (Search Engine Optimization) by Mani Karthik on 23-02-2008

Wordpress-SEO-guide

This has come out to be an one-stop SEO guide for all you wordpress users out there. I’m not sure if I’ve covered all the topics but I’m sure that these are(in fact all) the basic, essential steps all you wordpress users out there should follow in order to make sure that you have your wordpress blog on steroids. I’ve kept in mind all the SEO metrics possible that will make your blog SEO friendly.

The idea is to - “Put your wordpress blog on an SEO Auto pilot mode and keep writing articles that has a very high possibility to make it to the first page of Google, every time you publish them.”

The process of blogging on WordPress can be dissected in to three parts.

1 - Creating a powerful SEO friendly custom wordpress theme.
2 - Using all the power tools to catapult you ahead of others.
3 - Writing killer articles that are SE optimized.

How to create a custom SEO optimized, unique Wordpress theme?

Some people may argue that Wordpress is SEO friendly by itself, therefore you don’t really need an SEO. If you ask my opinion on this I’d say, both right and wrong. Right because, Wordpress is SEO friendly. Wrong because every Wordpress blog is SEO friendly.

Image this, everybody has a Bazooka to fight, so what makes the difference? Only the guy who has a better one will stand out. Similarly, only the guy with a unique custom wordpress theme can win over the others.

1. Selecting a SEO friendly wordpress theme for your site.
Check this first. Your theme holds a lot of importance in deciding your search engine ranks. Really. There may be sites that get away with it using a stupid theme or no theme at all, but remember, those sites are supported most of the times by other SEO factors that a common blogger may not have. Your theme, it’s layout structure, number of images used, code validation all should be taken into consideration while making a selection. Here’s a detailed structure.

- Select a theme with a SEO friendly layout. So that crawlers don’t find it difficult to find the content on your pages.

- The content should be clearly highlighted on the pages.

- The HTML and JavaScript code if present should limit to the first 15-20 lines of the source code. The first part of the source code should predominantly contain the content of your article.

- The whole HTML code of your pages should be completely valid. Use W3C Validator tools to check this and follow the recommendations accordingly.

- There should not be any/or very less flash and AJAX content on your template. If at all they are present, let them be in the footer/sidebar or below the fold. I don’t recommend it for the header. Resources - How to do SEO on flash enabled website, How to SEO with AJAX.

- Header of your theme is a good real estate for SEO. An image is fine, but in my experience I’ve seen that if text is placed in the header (either alone or combined with the image) with the necessary importance given (clue), it weighs more than the other text on your page. So select a theme carefully.

- When you select a theme , do a simulation test on the demo site. A simulation test is one that gives you an idea of how your pages would be seen by crawlers. In the search engine simulation test, if the results show the text featured on your theme demo, it means the theme is good for search engines. There are some themes in which we can see the text visually, but in a simulation test, no or very less text appears, keep away from such themes.

2. On site Optimization for Wordpress
On site optimization for wordpress is one of my favorite topics, simply because there is always a new concept that emerges out of the blue.

  • SEOing Wordpress Title Tags - A very often repeated topic this one. Still I find that many bloggers don’t implement it. In this tweak, the best option is to use the permalinks in the <category><post-title> format. Although, I find that adding the date option impresses Google. It also helps the users to find how old the post is.
    Resource - Title tags and Wordpress SEO
  • Interlinking your blog posts is an excellent way to spread the Google juice evenly.
  • Optimize your categories - Categories on wordpress is an excellent resource for SEO, not many people have discussed this if I’m right. But there are some tweaks that we can do to optimize it for the search engines.
  • SEO’ing the footer text - This is yet another SEO factor not many have discussed, but something that I find has a good scope. It may not work well for all themes as some themes eve completely ignore the footer. But if you use some wise tricks(clue) to give it the right kind of importance, it will help you get that extra mileage for your keywords.
    More onsite optimization tips or wordpress can be found here.

3. Put your wordpress blog on steroids.
A wordpress blog is SEO friendly by default, but adding some power tools to it can make it 10 times as effective as a naked blog. In fact, there are a lot of power tools available online, and many of them are scrap. The wise strategy is to pick the best ones that really fit your blog.

Here are 7 power tools that will catapult your wordpress blog from ordinary to a super blog.

    1. Headspace Wordpress SEO - This is an extremely good plugin for Wordpress that I found very effective. It is even better than the much hyped All in One SEO plugin. It is a bit hard to manage this as there are more options in it, but this is far more effective than All in One SEO.
    2. Google XML Sitemaps - Sitemaps are an essential for your wordpress blog. You can either create a manual one here or use this plugin. The plugin creates an automatically updated sitemap whenever there’s a change in the site, like an article or a page edit.
    3. Homepage Excerpts - Duplicate content is a big issue on Wordpress. The same content is shown on one or more places on Wordpress and hence the chances of duplicate content and supplementary pages are more. But using this plugin will reduce the chances of duplicate content on wordpress as the homepage content is cut short.
    4. Social Bookmarking - Getting your sites content to travel and propagate is a key factor to getting popular. And what more could be better than social bookmarking? This is a best social bookmarking plugin I’ve seen in the recent times and the X number of them that’s been released.
    5. KB Linker - Extremely useful plugin. You know that internal linking is one of the best way to spread the Google juice and increase the authority and importance of pages. This plugin lets you to select a keyword and whenever there’s an occurrence of the word in your articles, a link can be automatically placed to the keyword. Use it to link to your articles and it increases the internal linking drastically.
    6. Kill supplemental results - There are more instances on Wordpress that increases the chances of supplemental results than you thought of. Homepages, Archives, articles the chances of getting supplemental results on a naked wordpress blog is higher. Use this plugin to decrease the chances in autopilot mode.
    7. Bunny’s Technorati tags - If you are looking for backlinks and traffic from Technorati blogs, you must have this plugin. I’m not a Technorati enthusiast, so I’ve not used them on this blog, but yes, I’ve tested it on other blogs and it works fine.

There are lot of SEO plugins available at the moment, but the truth is that you don’t have to use them all simultaneously. Many of them do the same purpose but some do one task better than other. In the above list, you can safely use all of them together without any clash while serving the purpose of SEO’ing Wordpress.

Now, that more or less completes the “Ordinary to Super blog” power tools that you need. But more importantly there are a few things that you should keep in mind or keep away from.

What you shouldn’t do to SEO your wordpress blog.

  1. Say NO to Link Exchanges.
    Link exchanges are a waste of time. Unless you have a product that’s difficult to sell and get inbound links to like a P standing up thing, you really don’t have to do a link exchange. The links you acquire doing a link exchange is not really worth the effort as a one way link. So focus on your content and let the links come in because you have awesome content.
  2. Avoid Wordpress themes that has lot of JS code especially in the first 50 lines.
    The first few lines of your blog when scanned by a crawler, is checked for vital information about your blog. Whether you have meta description tags or not, you need to have some information in the first few lines (speculated it’s 30, 50 and 100) of your code.
  3. Do not tag one article in more than one category.
    It’s not a good idea to tag your article in more than one category. It is in a way fooling your readers and increases the chances of duplicate content. More info here.
  4. Do not display the Archives links on the homepage OR use the Archives section.
    Archives increases the possibility of duplicate content. Either don’t use them or use the page specific meta tags to no follow/no index them. Headspace plugin can handle all this.
  5. Do not use plugins that clash with each other.
    In the frenzy to get everything and not lose all, you install all the plugins only to find that nothing works out. I can give you an example. Using Headspace and Google XML Sitemaps with All in One SEO is not a good option. Especially if you are controlling the Robots.txt from Headspace, it tries to control Robots.txt, while All in One SEO too tried to write it. Which calls in a clash. So make sure you know what you are doing when installing plugins that serve the same or similar purpose. The best way out would be to have an in depth look into all the details and monitor what’s happening.

I hope I’ve covered all the bare essentials to SEOing your wordpress blog. If you follow the above steps, I can guarantee you that you’ll have great platform to blog. Now, it depends on what you write and how good you write that will decide how your ranks are on the SERPs. That’s something you should learn yourself, I don’t think anyone can train you on it although can give you pointers on concepts like keyword research and copy writing.

P.S - You’ll find numerous articles on the net googling for “SEO wordpress” but many of them were written long ago and does not reflect the new ideas and concepts pf the trade, which is what made me write this article. Hope it helped.

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Is that a new term you heard? Dangling pages?

It probably got popularized by Andy more than anyone else, and I think there is some sense in the concept.

Dangling pages can be described as -

Links that point to any page with no outgoing links.

And according to Google’s docs -

They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” - extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

A better description is also over here

OK, so Dangling pages are the ones that -

- updateAre not accessed by traffic/users
- Does have incoming links to it.
- Does not link to any page internally/externally.
- Does not carry any weightage what so ever.

Let me clarify something. Dangling pages are not the same as supplementary pages. Supplementary pages are a different scenario probably because they have the least importance in comparison to other pages on a website. They may pass juice and links. They get indexed but are not shown on the normal search index, while dangling pages may be shown.

When I worked with Alamy.com they had almost 60% of their individual HTML pages in the Supplementary Index, which were not preferred to be shown on the normal search index by Google. But none of them were Dangling pages. They all had severe interlinking done, and sometimes even relished links from outside.

But there were dangling pages too. There were pages and files in the live site, that were never used or linked to. They probably were installed for testing purposes and later not used. But they were indexed and Google thought they were scrap.

It could happen to your site too. In blogs, it is highly unlikely that there are dangling pages unless you have a poor template and a very poor linking system.

How to avoid dangling pages in a blog?

  • Interlink pages as much as possible.
  • Let there not be a page that does not link to any other page internally or externally.
  • Let there be a universal navigation bar or linking structure that will ensure that even the most unimportant page get’s into the linking network.

So essentially, dangling pages are not good for your site/blog. Remove them or reduce their occurrences. Sometimes even an important page can be mistaken for a dangling page if the navigation structure fails to update the links.

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Feb
10
Filed Under (Blogging) by Mani Karthik on 10-02-2008

Have you thought about it? If yes, this article is for you, if not quit at once.

When I first started a blog on a blogspot account, I was in a very bad shape, to be honest.
Just like you, I was in the learning phase of the blogging phenomena.
I picked a free template, tweaked it a bit to suit my preferences, and added all the possible plugins.
And when someone told me that content is the king, I wrote content daily. As anybody’s guess I struggled to find content. I’ll list down the things that really bothered me at the time of blogging.

  • Content
    - Somebody would’ve already blogged about the content that I thought writing of.
    - It was difficult to write long paragraphs about something very silly.
  • Audience
    - No comments
    - Confused over who I’m writing to.
  • Returns
    - No incoming money.
    - No appreciation.

Content was the major concern. When people told that you should find traffic rich keywords, I found it difficult to write on “Mesothelioma” and “Asbestosis”. And when I managed to find some interesting topics, others would’ve already blogged about it and it would dishearten me.To top it up, even when I wrote about some topics that I was comfortable about, there wouldn’t be any response from the readers (if at all there were any). I think it’s a phase all young bloggers go through when they start blogging. Despite all this events, it was not an easy task to climb up the ladder.

But, down the line, there are some things that I think worked out in making the blog a success. And let me be honest with you, there is no rocket science involved. To bring you all that in a capsule form, here goes.

  • Content is not the king. Consistency is.
    Well, content might be. But I think being consistent in delivering articles to your readers plays a more important part than the content itself.
  • There is no topic on steroids. Your passion in your steroid.
    You don’t need to write on mesothelioma and asbestosis. You write from your head but make sure you have the dedication and passion all the way. It shines through.
  • You will or cannot make everybody happy.
    Success doesn’t mean that you will make everyone happy. A more important thing is to make everyone talk about you. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t something that you need to work towards but something that comes along.
  • Nor will you get followers overnight.
    Followers doesn’t exist. It’s a wrong term. What I’d be interested to know is, the number of people whom you managed to develop an interest in.
  • Success does not come with money.
    Success isn’t money. It’s the measure of how close you are to your personal goals. This is my personal perspective, it should differ for you.

So there you go, all that blogging taught me in three years in a capsule form.

The point I’m trying to make here is that, blogging is a profession/career/hobby/whatever that is very slow in delivering results. It’s probably not for the stock broker kind who wants a return the very next day. It climbs slowly and steadily. Yes, the returns are there but it comes as a surprise and you can never invite it to you. Sweet isn’t it?

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Feb
06

As you might already know, titles and title tags are often seen carrying more weight than any other on site optimization factors be it on blogs or static webpages. And I bet, that it’s the one thing all of us tweak mostly to try and reposition yourself on the SERPs.

Well, the liking to the title tag may be due to various reasons.

  • It is one of the most easily spotted onsite optimization factor.
  • It is easy to tweak it.
  • Lots of options are available, which makes it fun.
  • It has almost a direct and immediate effect on the Google SERPs.

Apart from all these options, it is also true that it’s difficult to get the right combination of keywords, that will give you the maximum results on the SERPs. So the challenge for an SEO would be to find this right combination and the perfect title tag.

Before going into the perfect title tag, let’s see what are the “don’t do’s” with title tags?

Well, one word would be enough to explain it all - Spam. With all it’s flexibility and weightage, it’s very easy for SEO’s to get high with it and screw it all up. We’ve seen lot of examples in the near future that were “study materials” on how not to write a title. Just go Google down “SEO India” and you will find some really interesting ones.

Now, watching those sites rank high for a particular keyword using the so called “title spam” and “title keyword stemming”, would naturally throw this question across to you - “Why can’t I do a keyword spam on the title tag, when it will deliver the results? After all, that’s what my client is keen on.”

Very honest question and a dangerous one at the same time. My answer to that question would be another one?

“How long do you want your site to appear number one-ten on the SERPs ? ”

Choice 1 - A few months

Choice 2 - As long as the site exists

If it’s choice two…..yep you got it right man…you better not spam.

A spammy title tag would look something like “SEO India, SEO services India, SEO Indian, Indian SEO, The SEO India, SEO Indias”.

I must appreciate this webmasters English creative writing skills but seriously this is no better than a high school guy.

“I read it at Aaron’s E-book that you should include your keywords in the title tag so there you have it, all the ten versions of the keyword! ”

Rather than doing good, this kind of practice will give you bad reputation (if not immediately) in the long run.

So what is a good title tag? How does it look like?

A good title tag is

- A healthy one.
- A short and sweet one.
- Both visually and technically appealing.

Now, this is old school isn’t it? We all know that good title tags are supposed to be the short and sweet, non spammy and all that but, when our competition is tough (and they are spamming) how can I make sure that I reap my profits ?

Well, that’s the catch my friend. That’s what makes you unique.

  1. Use your keywords “wisely” on the title.
    Just because you heard that you got to fix your keywords on the title, you don’t have to repeat it and make it look like spam.
    Let’s see it like this. Only you know what your keywords are, not your readers. Draft a title so that your readers can’t make out what your keyword are. It should be a carefully drafted copy that “includes” the keywords in a natural way.
    Ex: SEO India, SEO India Services,SEO India outsourcing, SEO from India - NOT good. It shows that your keyword is SEO India.
    Good Ex:- SEO outsourced services in India from - your company name -.
  2. Use your competition to your advantage.
    Analyze all your competitors. See if they follow a pattern. If they’re all spammers, you have an opportunity to beat them. See what’s a better copy for you to break into all of their positions. *Food for thought* ;)
  3. Makes sure the title makes sense to a reader.
    Read out your title tag to your colleague or friend. See how he responds to it. Don’t just think of all that you can and plug it in.
  4. Let there not be just keywords, but synonyms too.
    Synonyms are a great way to build traffic. Repeating the same keywords in combination with other words may get you the spam tag, but adding it with synonyms is a better alternative.
  5. Special characters on the title tags.
    Let there not be any complicated characters in your title. I’ve seen people place funny symbols like tilde and ambersand to create a visual impact. In fact it does but reader’s  probably might like you to use, even that much space for some more information. .::[ So use it ]::. :)

Essentially, titles are like your visiting cards to a site. You can create and print them in whatever ways you like it. But if you really want a information seeker to read/access you, you better give them the information they are looking for and let that be in good, simple and understandable language.

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Jan
19
Filed Under (Tools) by Mani Karthik on 19-01-2008

TNX.net is a one stop place for both Advertisers and Publishers who’d like to make some quick bucks online. Well, the idea is pretty clear. If you have a blog, you can advertise it on other publishers network at cheap rates and if you are a publisher you can earn money by displaying others ads. Simple as that.

The TNX, website itself has a very user friendly layout and design, where everything is explained at every step. You won’t find it difficult to use it at all. And they have made the registration process too very simple. You just need to give in the minimum details and you’re done!

At the moment, TNX has 41075 users with 31844835 links in the whole system. Pretty impressive!

So how the whole system works on is based on points. You get 2000 points right when you sign up itself. Then for each ad displayed on your site/blog, you get points at TNX and you can redeem it later as money from them.

TNX also has an affiliate program that is easy to step up. Earning money will be an automatic process, once you have the referrals coming in. The pay out percentage is 13.3% for direct referrals which is impressive.

Setting up a TNX publisher account is easy too. Just sign up, install the TNX code on your website, then wait for ther approval which normally happens in less than 2 days, then display ads on your site (max 4), ge the points and redeem them as money form TNX. Pretty simple isn’t it? You can sell the TNX points to the TNX system or other TNX users also.

There is a cool application called income calculator, which on giving in your PR, number of pages and the total number of ads that you are going to display, will give you the amount of money you are likely to make. This is a nice tool just to get you an idea of how powerful TNX is.

For Advertisers, creating an account and finding millions of pages to feature their ads is easy.

The sidebar gives quick access to starting an Ad Campaign. Thanks to TNX’s well-organized Ad Campaign wizard, creating and ad campaign is easy as breeze. You can set the parameters for the sites where your ads should appear on: website categories, geo-location, number of Yahoo Backlinks (YB) and Google Page Rank.TNX even provides a calculator of how many links you will get on based on the parameters you chose and your spending plan (in TNX points)

On the whole, TNX is a nice place to find and sell ads, and make some money or get some great ad deals for cheap rates. Using it is very easy as they’ve take good care in ensuring that the whole process is kept simple and user friendly.

tnxhomepage[1]

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Jan
10
Filed Under (Tools) by Mani Karthik on 10-01-2008

The guys at MyBLogLog, Ian Kennedy and his team have been putting on some good show recently. First they released the MyBlogLog buttons , then they had a competition, and now they have a new widget, the AboutMe widget.

The ABout Me widget is an interesting one, if you have been planning to put all that social media profile links and a compressed profile with all the info on you, this is the widget for you.

Check this sample widget. It’s Ians. I had trouble customizing it for the blog and believe so many others too would’ve had the same problem. Yes, the colours and text were very much cusotmizable, but adjusting the width was a problem.

And guess that, the guys have gone ahead and added that option too. Now you can adjust the width of the widget suiting it for your blog.

I had tried the widget on the footer first, but thought I’ll wait for some more customization. Well, now with all the customization available, you might want to add it to your blog too.

After the Lijit guys, I’m liking the MyBlogLog guys too.

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Jan
08

Today let’s review this theme from Headset Options, which is supposed to be a SEO friendly, AdSense ready wordpress theme.

Like all other AdSense ready themes, this one too focuses on text and space compatibility for AdSense. The main reasons for it’s compatibility for AdSense is that the text of the articles are in type and size similar to that of AdSense text ads. It is spaced in such a away that if an AdSense ad is placed amidst the post, it would sit in perfect camouflage in the article.

When you place the AdSense code, just make sure that the title links of the ads have the same colour as the links in the theme, and that’s light blue (#6699CC).

How SEO friendly is this Wordpress theme?

Considering the SEO factors that decide how it forms an SEO friendly theme, what stands out is the fact that it has a SEO friendly layout . If you take a look at the screenshot you’ll see that the layout of the theme is designed in such a way that the crawlers will have no trouble finding out what is the content on the site.

The titles of the posts are included in the H1 tags, and there is the proper use of other HTML tags as well making it standards compliant.

During crawling, the site layout is designed in such a way that, the heading is crawled first, then the pages, then the content with proper markup, and then the sidebar content. This in fact is a good strategy to deliver the content by importance to the search engines. Many other wordpress themes, which claim to be SEO friendly, miss this very basic feature.

One factor however, that I find missing is the <strong> attribute. If the strong attribute was CSS styled to not stand out bolded from the text, readers will not find it awkward, when you <strong> out the keywords. As of now, when you manually “strong” out the keywords, they stand apart as bolded text, so there is a limit to using keywords.

The same problem goes with the heading and titles. Wish the strong attribute was also included with the titles. It looks very plain and flimsy as of now. But this is something you can easily add by tweaking with the CSS styling.

But overall, it’s a very light weight, search engine friendly theme, that is put on steroids when using AdSense text ads. It’s so seo friendly that the only problem I see with it is that it misses the frills to impress the human eye. But if you want a theme to use for your website that is focused on making money from AdSense, targeting the search engine traffic, giving less importance to the human eye, then this is the theme for you.

Rating scores
AdSense compatibility - 8/10
Search Engine Friendliness - 8/10

Download the wordpress theme here .

AdSense ready SEO friendly theme - Headset Options

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Dec
20
Filed Under (Blogging) by Mani Karthik on 20-12-2007

Have you ever had the chance of having a traditional Indian meal ? For the Indian readers, this question is irrelevant but for the rest of the world, this article might be interesting and mouth watering at the same time.

The (grand) Indian meal is pretty popular, particularly the south Indian one. Once, a foreign friend of mine who had the chance to have one jokingly said, that the thali itself reminded him of the solar system model he learned at school. Huh? He said, the rice is the sun (being at the middle), and there are lot of planets and their satellites revolving around it making it look almost like a solar system.

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Well, I’d agree him on all points except that, in the traditional Indian meal, eating the sun won’t burn you, but the curries (the satellites) may, they are very spicy.

Having said that, I think there’s lot of points in common between having an Indian meal and blogging.

  1. Template.
    In blogging, it is essential that you have a cool template, good enough to get the attention of the reader. Similarly, in the meals, there’s the template - the plantain leaf. A plantain leaf is used instead of a plate, which must be large enough to carry all the ingredients well.
    Similarity - 80%.
  2. Starters.
    In both blogging and the meal, there are the starters. In blogs they are the headers and above the fold stuff. If the starter is good both the meal and the blog is enjoyable. In the meal the starters are placed “above the fold” and also in the blog.
    Similarity - 99%
  3. Main course.
    And there’s the main course which is rice and the curries. In the blog, there are the articles in different categories. Having a good main course fulfills your hunger, be it a blog or the meal.
    Similarity - 99.7%
  4. Dessert.
    In the meals, there is a always something sweet at the end. It normally would be “payasam”. And in blogging, there are the comments. Comments, though not always sweet, is definitely a dessert!
    Similarity - 59%
  5. Addiction.
    Both the meal and blogging is addictive! If you taste it once, whenever you think of one, your mouth starts watering and you can’t get rid of it. Everyday, new tastes, new flavors, a whole new meal !
    Similarity - 70%
  6. Widgets.
    In the blog you have the widgets to spice you your blog. Like the Lijit widget or the Mybloglog widget, and in a meal, you have the pickles and banana chips that sits alongside the main template , though very small, adding to the spice of the blog.
    Similarity - 85.6%
  7. SEO and the thali meal.
    A thali meal is very much like doing a search engine optimization on your blog. As you know, in SEO, there are some procedures that has to be done methodologically in order to put yo in good shape. Like the keyword saturation and onsite optimization procedures. In an Indian meal, the order of serving the meal is really important. First, the spicy pickle, then some banana chips, then some curries, then the rice, then the sambhar(spicy curry), then the next set of curries!
    It sounds more or less similar right? If you mix up the order neither the meals is enjoyable nor the blog. You have to serve every ingredient in the same proportion.

    SEO - Keyword density - You sprinkle the keywords here and there to meet the right density.
    Meals - Salt - You sprinkle the salt to meet the right density.

    SEO - You make sure that the template is search engine friendly by ensuring a standard three column template with a proper header and footer.
    Meals - The template (plantain leaf) is very much like the template with the header to one side and the footer(tapering end) to another.

Seven reasons to think that an Indian meal is similar to blogging - there you have it. Now, some of the points may sound bizzare, but if there’s at least a 50% similarity that you found, I’d be happy!

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