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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What is a landing page?

When a visitor or a crawler first access your URL, the first page/file that is seen/served to the visitor/crawler is called the landing page. (No, we are not going to talk SEM here at all. In SEM landing page is one where the visitor is first “brought” to.)

Generally, the landing page is often an HTML or a static page in used websites. Earlier when there was no definition of what a landing page was, there were many versions of landing pages. Some websites used animations, some used funnel marketing techniques, some greeted people with funny and interesting welcome messages, some people used disclaimers and some even used redirection pages.

So all of that was used in the olden days. Come web 2.0, Google and the search engine optimization gurus, landing page optimization has gained importance as never before and it has helped the user in one way because many of the landing pages are now standardized.

These days web designers are aware of the importance a landing page and know how it would help them in beating competition on the serps.

Now, there are two types of landing pages. They’re based on your purpose. A marketeer who wants to market his product in a one page funnel system, is talking about a landing page that will help him convert a potential interested person to a client/customer. You might have seen such pages for E-books and other product marketing pages.

In such pages, the intention of the ,marketeer is to make you convince to buy the product asap, driving you to take an action (often that target) through a carefully drafted copy. Well, for this kind of landing pages, you’d need a good copyrighter and some cash. You don’t really need SEO the way other sites do.

So please make clear that we are not talking about one page, funnel system marketing page that gives you the “Ultimate secret what every SEO hides from you” strategy here, but purely SE optimizing your normal landing pages.

How important is a landing page and it’s optimization?

OK, so we have all sorts of CMS’s today. So a landing page optimization would make sense for a static page guy who is trying to market an ebook but how does it help a wordpress or Joomla guy?

Let’s talk about static webpages first.

A landing page is “supposed” to contain more vital information about what the site is/what the product is than any other page on the website.
Scanning a landing page will be the surest way to find out what product you are selling and who you are. Hence, search engines, give a decent weightage to them.

How to design an effective landing page?

Designing a layout that will help the crawler to pick up only the vital information we need it to, is the key in landing page optimization. In static webpages (HTML or other), it is easy to design a layout as we want it since you have all the flexibilities. So what are the things that you should keep in mind.

- First things first.
As a thumbrule, place the most vital information about the product/service in a very recognizeable format in an evident manner on the landing page. This applies for both search engines and humans.
Place them before any thing else in the BODY tag. Let the most important one appear first and others follow.

- Give the most importance to the most important.
Use H1 tags to highlight the main content on the page. Also use STRONG tag to highlight the cream of your content.

- Follow a SEO friendly layout. Place the content to be crawled in the first block and not in the last one.

- Use the space wisely, instead of large image headings you might want to use a much crawlable textual content that describes the product/service.

- Keep a clean and thin code. Use standardized code structure to minimize the erros and invalid entries. Follow a strict code that validates to ensure that the page collects the value factor.

- Use a spider simulator to test simulate the page and make sure that the content is ready for the crawlers in a palatable format.

- Get maximum incoming links to the first landing page with it’s file name (like www.yourname.com/index.html) with the appropriate anchor text you need.

- Maintain a healthy keyword ratio on the landing page.

- Use a nice footer text to make sure you’ve lost nothing.

Having said all this, it is easy for anyone to just overdo things and get the whole thing screwed. So here are somethings that you should take care of.

Things to keep in mind.

Flash / Ajax

Use no flash/ajax on the landing page please. It is only good for the user and not the search engines. If at all you are keen on using such content, make sure you leave room for textual content and let it appear first with more importance than the flash. It can be pushed to a side.

Frames

No frames please. Frames are so old stuff, people have many numerous ways to get over frames but produce the same effect of calling different frames to a single page. So never use frames because they simply dissolve your SEO quotient. If you are keen on frames use a two frame model where the frames are split into two and you should select one over the other for SEO and deply the tactis there. It wouldn’t give you the same result as of using a single page, but yes, it is not very far.

Popups

Many might already know this, as AdSense doesn’t allow it. It has less effect on SEo but yes, on the whole if you look at the quality factor there is a grey shade for using the popup. So keep away from them on the landing apge.

Don’t dump links

OK so you have your homepage, so why don’t I dump all the category pages and other links that I have on the landing page. After all, it can’t escape the users eyes. true - but more than the UA side, too many links on the homepage dissolves your SEO quotient. Keep them toa minimum. Use only the link that will take you to the most important pages on the site. And use the proper anchor text there, let it be keywords combined with categories so that you hit two birds in one shot.

Javascript

Oh! Did i not mention javascript? You knew it anyway! Never use them.(If possible, on the inside pages too.)

How about in Wordpress/ Joomla?

In wordpress, you should do pretty much all the basic SEO that you do, and also take special attention to ward off duplicate content. Ex:- Archives, Featured post etc

Tips and tricks

• Use a map or street address in the homepage. It will help you to get featured on the SERPS with your location. This is not a guarantee and mostly works only for US clients. But if you have decent traffic and the map/address placed well on the landing page, you’ll get some extra space on the SERPs with your location etc.
• Use all the H1..H2..H3 tags to categorize your text content into most important(H1)..less important (H2)..etc.
• Use a three column layout. Enough said.
• Avoid content duplication.

Ashish Saini from Ashfame asked me a few SEO related questions. I thought the the answers may be of interest to you.

Q 1. What is the SE issue to have a post under multiple categories? please explain in
detail.

Answer: Tagging an article with multiple tags will result in the article appearing in all the categories respectively. In the category pages, if there are to categories say category X and category Y, there will be two entries, while the content being the same. This results in duplicate content and Google pushing your content to supplementary pages eventually. Although this is not guaranteed, a consistent use of multiple tags will increase the number of duplicate content on your site which is not good. 

This is the same as listing your archive pages on the blog. You can read more about this topic here, and here.

2. For a google search of “ashfame”
it shows “do you mean ashfaque”.
How can I get rid of this?

Answer: Don’t worry about it. It’s just because it’s a name. Search for arneld and it will suggest you arnold. Since the name you searched is only present in one site, Google thinks it might be a mistake, and suggests a similar term resent in more websites or in it’s index. This happens for all non-popular terms, particularly names. One way to beat it is to have your name on many websites or as links.

Readers. if you have more inputs on the two questions, do share it. If you want to ask a question, do it here.

Last day, at a seminar,  I was about to give a presentation on SEO, and to break the ice, I asked a question - “Which is the one website that you can’t afford to visit a day.” As obvious, I was expecting someone to answer - Google. But he came up with an answer that stunned me. I’ll never ask that question again. :D

What happens when you overdo things? You reach the dead end. Sometimes you get stuck just because you have too many ideas in your head, sometimes because you just had too much of what you were doing. All of us need a break at times, from blogging, from researching, from calculating and coding. Luckily, there are lot of junk sites available on the net, that will help you wile away your time, just like the guy who answered me.

Just managed to create a list of those sites which will help you get a break from your chores and at the same time give you that extra juice to be more productive at work. Whenever I face a readers block, I visit these sites and all the time, I manage to get an idea or two to blog from each of them.

	Windows Live Search Now this could come as a surprise right? The reason why I select Windows live search is that it throws up weird results unlike Google, so it’s kind of fun to play around with it. Type in whatever comes to your mind, hit search and it will give you the weirdest results.
	Digg It’s interesting to see the top stories on Digg. What I personally like is to study the pattern of the top dugg stories. Doing a search to find the top stories dugg, and the top stories buried itself will give you great insights on how to create popular articles on your blog.
	Go Daddy This guy is my favorite. When I search for a particular domain, it throws me the synonyms, the antonyms and everything in between. Most of the times, just to see the results, I do a interesting domain name search.
	Seth Godin Of course you know what the man is all about. But what I admire at his blog is his writing style and how he manages to inspire you with his outstanding persona. Read a few posts from his yester years and you’ll get some awesome ideas to blog.
	Smashing Magazine These guys rock! If you ever wanted to learn what “Digg oriented stories” are, you better learn from them. They have enormous list of the coolest stuff on the internet, that you can’t deny bookmarking them. A reference point anytime.
	Mashable Pete Cashmore, does it best! One of the top websites in the world, with a traffic any website will envy for. They have all the upcoming web 2.0 stuff with them and no one misses their radar. One stop shop for all the trendy and coolest stuff online.
	ProBlogger Everybody knows him. What I’m more interested in the site is it’s archives. A read at the archives provides you with insights on how to write articles the popular way! Reading the archives is like taking a tonic !
	Gizmodo Ever felt guilty of not being able to track the latest arrivals in the technology front? Just visit gizmodo and the next day you’ll be the winner at office chats and discussion boards. Valuable information, every first time. all the time!
	Stumble Upon Another favorite of mine,perfect to wile away your time, if you are running out of creative juices. One look and a few stumbles can rejuvenate you just like an ayurvedic massage !
	Flickr We all know this guys cool ! What I’m personally interested in is browsing the flickr collection through the flock browser. If possible I favorite a couple of pictures that I could use on the blog. Good one to wile away time, productively!
	Blogging pro Everything for wordpress is here, widgets,themes,plugins,tweaks,hacks and what not? Blogging pro has links to all the resources here, perfect for bloggers, who want to spice up their template every single day.
	Lifehacker Tips, tweaks and news on technology. Gina manages to put in every information possible, on the above updated daily. Perfect if you’d like to learn how to write a technology blog.
	Digital Point forums Got a domain to sell? Have doubt on installing a software, Got Adsense doubts? There are guys here waiting to answer you. It’s like the song by scorpions - You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!
	Yahoo Answers A great place to check your proficiency in any selected category. People ask questions there, if you take the role of an advisor, people rank you for the quality of answers you provide. A great place for knowledge sharing!
	Deviant Art Great place to rejuvenate yourselves with some art. Got loads and loads of stuff you can stare at and feel the awe! If you had enough reading text stuff, this is the place to be. A visual treat for your eyes.
	Ouch My Toe Another personal favorite of mine. This guy knows what’s comedy to you and what’s not. I can bet that he’ll make you laugh in the very first read. A good place to start your day or  escape from that stressful day.
	Google Blog Search Another great place to find interesting blogs. If you’d like to read a bit more on your niche topic and see what the competition is like, you better go here and search for related stuff. No no technorati here!
	Wordpress plugins database If you are on wordpress, you’d want to visit this place too often. Because this is the official place for all the plugins and latest arrivals. If you love to tweak your template too often and play around installing new plugins, go for it!
	A list apart No idea what’s CSS? Bad design skills? Then it’s high time you visited this site. You don’t need to know CSS deeply, but this guy will help you get a taste about it the standard way. Can get a bit boring after a few visits, but worth a visit in a while.
	Web master world One of the oldest forums around. They have both amateurs and professionals as members so you might want to indulge in. What I like personally is the conflicts and debates there. You gain yourself some knowledge being involved in it.
	Lorelle on Wordpress If you are looking for quality articles on blogging then this is the place to be for some inspiration. There could be some repetition here and there, but overall a great place to be when running out of ideas to blog.
	Facebook My favorite social networking site. With it’s rich applications and great network of members, it’s a great place to network with professionals. Yes, there are lot of junk applications available but if you know how to maintain a professional and serious profile, this is the place to be.
	Top youtube videos If you’re looking for some fun, this site is the best choice. It lists the top videos on Youtube, under various categories and it’s updated regularly.
	Download Squad This is a blog about computer related stuff. There are lot of software review and download sites available but this one stands out because of it’s quality. A visit will give you access to some cool softwares and tools which you will miss otherwise.
	Webware This is a great site for updating yourself on web 2.0 application and it’s tweaks. If you don’t want to be lost out on the web 2.0 front, you better grab these guys feed. If you are running out of ideas to do review applications, this guy can help you.

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.

BullZip PDF Printer - BullZip PDF Printer is a virtual printer driver that enables you to convert any printable document or image to PDF format.

doPDF - doPDF enables you to convert any printable document to PDF format.

PDF Xchange Viewer  - PDF-XChange Viewer is an alternative viewer for PDF files that enables you to view and annotate PDF files. You can add text, sticky notes, and other annotations and save them to the file, which will be compatible with the standard Adobe PDF reader.

Foxit PDF Reader  - Foxit PDF Reader is an alternative to Adobe Reader, that allows you to view and print PDF files. Unlike Adobe Reader, it opens PDF files very fast, without any delay.

Scan 2 PDF  - Scan2PDF enables you to scan paper documents and save them to PDF format on your computer for digital archiving or backup. In addition, you can also load images from your hard drive and combine them with a scanned document, or combine multiple documents/images into a single PDF file.

Cute PDF Writer   - CutePDF Writer allows you to convert any printable document to PDF format. It installs as a virtual printer and is available from any application that offers a `Print` option. The program is easy to use, just select the CutePDF printer and click the print button.

A PDF Number   - A-PDF Number is a simple tool that lets you add page numbers to the bottom of the pages contained in a PDF file. You can choose between regular numbers or roman numbers, and also select the color and optionally define a prefix. The number can be inserted to the left, right or in the middle of the page bottom.

Adobe reader speedup   - Adobe Reader Speed-Up allows you to significantly speed-up the time it takes to load the Adobe reader application.

PDF to Exe   - PDF2EXE enables you to compile a PDF file into a standalone executable (.exe) file that integrates a simple PDF viewer and does not require Adobe Reader (or any other PDF reader) to be installed on the system.

Here are 5 wordpress plugins that will help you increase the time spent by readers on your blog.

1. List posts by category
   This plugin will list out an array of posts in each category (which you can select) thereby, helping the readers to find useful posts with less clicks.
2. Random Posts 
   This plugin helps you create a list of randomly generated posts from your archives every time the page loads. Incredibly good one to make your readers stick to your blog for that extra time. See the sidebar for a demo.
3. KB Linker plugin
   KB Linker will link phrases you specify to sites you specify. For example, you could make it so that whenever “Wordpress” occurs in a post it is automatically linked to wordpress.org. All you do is enter keyword/URL pairs into the Options=>KB Linker page in your admin menu.
   To make best use of this plugin, instead of specifying other websites, specify your own articles to keywords, so that whenever there is an occurrence of that keyword, an old article of your’s is linked to it. This plugin helps in distributing the page rank juice this way.
4. AJAX comments
   This plugin will make commenting a breeze, with no page loads or refreshs. Good one to improve your number of comments as well as encouraging readers to stay more time on the blog.
5. Related Posts
   Good old related posts plugin that enables you to show off some related posts from your blog based on keywords used.

Recently in the WordCamp 2007, Matt Cutts talked about making your wordpress blog Search Engine friendly and the importance of practising White hat SEO. He had released his powerpoint presentation file too, in which he recommends some must have power plugins for Wordpress. Some of them are the ones he is using currently while some  are those that he’s considering to use in the future. All these plugins are SEO friednly ones, that help you avoid duplicate content and climb your way up the SERPs. Here, I’m providing you all those wordpress plugins that Matt Cutts recommended with the links to the websites where you can find them.
Photo courtesy cinefilo

Plugins Mr.Cutts uses currently - Strongly recommended.

• Akismet - For spam protection
• Math Comment - For spam protection. This one asks for the 3+2 question before you comment on his blog.
• Google Analytics plugin - Adds Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog for tracking.
• Feedburner feed replacement
• Democracy  - For adding a poll to your sidebar.
• SEO title tag plugin - Makes SEo friendly titles
• WP - Cache plugin - Makes your blog faster and responsive.

Plugins Mr.Cutts is considering to use in future

• Brian’s threaded comments - Where you can reply to comments.
• Comment Karma - Where users can rate other user’s comments
• Highlight author - Where an authors comment will be seen highlighted.
• WWW redirect - Allows you to set various url redirect options and thereby control how users access your blog.
• Permalink redirect - This plugin replies with a 301 redirect to urls that’s different from what is requested on archives (or direct entries).
• Related posts - Shows links to related posts from your blog

I suggest that you use all the plugins he recommends, they’re all hand picked by the Google man himself !

Did you know that your wordpress blog is not completely SEO friendly?

Of course, wordpress is 90% SEO friendly with it’s title tags, seo friendly templates and the like. But there is one loose point in wordpress that spoils the whole show.

I’m talking about duplicate content. This matters most with Google.It does not like duplicate content on any site. And Google’s handcuff to this problem is Supplemental index.

Let’s see how Wordpress is responsible for creating duplicate content on your blog and ultimately your blog ending up in the supplementary index.

Villain No.1 - Archive pages

Villain No.2 - Categories

Archive pages
Have you set your default archive settings to daily, weekly or monthly? If yes, you are in trouble. When google bots visit your site, it sees the same content first on the post page, then on the archive page, and third on the index page. So it is duplicate content three times.

Categories
Do you have the habit of tagging a particular post in more than one category? Trouble again!

How to overcome?

Solution 1
- Do not archive pages. If at all you are archiving pages, make sure that robots/crawlers does not crawl those pages.
- How to ensure robots don’t crawl archived pages.
- Use nofollow robots meta tags on the archive template.Here’s how you do it -

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

-Or use this Duplicate content cure plugin - It automatically adds the nofollow robots meta tag on to the archive pages, so that archived pages are not crawled by google.

Solution 2
- Do not categorize posts in more than one category. One post - one category. Mixing up categories makes duplicate content for the crawlers as well as creates a non-user friendly navigation structure as users are likely to see the same posts on each category.

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.