Ever had problems finding what your blogs ranks are on the search engines for particular keywords?
Like for instance, if you wanted to check where your blog ranked on Google for the keyword “make money online”, it would be a big task since the keyword itself is very competitive and if you are not problogger or shoemoney, you are probably in the 167th page or worse. So it’s not quite possible to track where your blog is ranking by searching through the Google results right?

Here is a nice tool that will take care of it. Rank Checker is a plugin for firefox that will take care of this task.
All that you have to do is , install the plugin, restart firefox and given in a keyword + URL combination into the plugin page.

Like for instance if you are finding out where the blog “dailyseoblog.com” is ranking for “wordpress seo blog” then give in these two criteria into the “domain” and “keyword” fields respectively and click go. First you add the combination to the queue and then on clicking the “start” button the engine searches for the results.

You’ll be able to get the search engine rank result for Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN). There is an option to give multiple keywords and also export the results to a CSV file, enabling you to open it in your spreadsheets. Pretty cool eh? However, one minute problem I faced is that it gave me no option to resize he window, it stretched all the way horizontally and wasn’t really maneuverable.

Install the Firefox plugin here.

Hey, have you ever checked out those SEO firms claims on the features page? I always make it a point to thoroughly go through all those points mentioned in those sites, particularly the “We do it all” segment.I mean clients too should go through this and let me tell you there are a few things by which you can easily mark out a fraud guy from genuine.

Recently, been to a popular SEO firms website who claimed to do “everything SEO”. Curious enough, I checked their features page to get an idea of what exactly dos they mean by saying “Everything SEO”.

Well, basically what the guys have done is, put in everything they could find as SEO and arrange them randomly in the features list.
One interesting feature list went something like below -

We do all SEO services.

• Search Engine Submissions
• Directories
• Link building Experts
• Google Pr Rank Increase solution
• Paid Inclusion solution
• Software Marketing
• Meta tags
• Title tags etc..

Brilliant isn’t it?
More than half of what’s said there is BS and is in no way related to SEO.

You see there is a common misconception in peoples mind about SEO. The reason is that many people give their own definitions of SEO and SO services. For instance take the elements discussed in the above list.

Search Engine Submissions - I’m assuming it means submitting your site to Google/Yahoo/MSN etc. Though it sounds interesting to a client who wants to get his post atop search engines, the real catch is that he is paying the SEO guys for doing nothing.

Search Engine Submissions are no longer valid. In the sense that there are smarter, assured and safer ways of getting indexed and there is no need for submitting to search engines. And even if you are keen on that, anyone can do it in five minutes. So what’s the point in paying someone USD 500 to submit our site to search engines?

And directories are so old my friend, nobody uses them except for spam and unacceptable content. Of course there are the great directories like BOTW and V7, but none of them carry any weightage nor can they help you earn search engine rankings. As a matter of fact, many of the directories are banned from Googles index.
And if you are keen on paying for directories, anyone can use the Yahoo directory. Who needs a “professional SEO” to show you how to?

And of course there is “Paid Inclusion solution”. I’m assuming it’s a SEM/paid marketing that the SEO guy is referring to. Now, wasn’t that called SEM and not SEO? If you are going to pay someone to get you “top ranks” (well, almost) then why do you need an SEO? Hire an SEM company in the first place, they’ll manage your funds properly.

So essentially, I find that many professional SEO guys are limited to doing things like directory submissions, meta tags and link exchanges. All of them makes no or little sense to SEO.

The real or toughest part of SEO is to think like the search engines and frame a strategical approach to take your site to the next level gaining it respect, authority and popularity. Everything else will follow.

What purpose does it serve?

Well, nothing much to give you any mileage but it helps you with a reference of all the things that you’ve stumbled in the past.

This tool helps you to import all your stumble upon favorites to one page, along with all the links to the websites you have stumbled and also categorizes them accordingly with tags.

A nice tool. I found it interesting to see all my stumbles on one page.
You can use this links page for several purposes such as -
- Resubmitting them to other social medias.
- Wiling away your time.
- Showing off your stumbles to your friends.
- Cross checking/Reviewing your stumble upon experience.

Okay, I cooked up all those but nevertheless the tool is cool. Check out.

Keyword density is the measurement in percentage, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page.

That’s the wikipedia’s definition of keyword density. The total number of times a particular keyword repeats in the whole copy.
Let’s pick an example.

SEO India is a keyword that many people think is getting lot of traffic on the search engines. As a matter of fact, the keyword SEO India is not a high traffic keyword. Also, keywords like Indian SEOs or SEO consultant India and even SEO firm India are ot high volume traffic keywords.
Interestingly, if you’d check the Google trends graph, you’ll see that the term SEO India is being repeatedly searched from India the most. So I’m under the impression that more than the clients who are likely to search for this keyword, it’s probably the SEOs in India who are searching it themselves.

Do you get an idea there?

In this example, out of the almost 100 words used, the keyword SEO India is being repeated 7 times and in it’s variants. So theoretically, the keyword density is 7%.

According to old school SEO, a keyword density of 6-8% is pretty healthy. This can change according to the competition on that keyword.
Having said that it doesn’t suggest you that as you increase your keyword density, the more the chances to rank. No. Beyond a healthy level, the keyword density would be assumed to be spam.

Now, the 6-7% keyword density is the old school SEO. It’s no longer valid or you just can’t depend on it.

Come web 2.0 and a lot has changed on the web. The way pages are created, the way content is sourced and displayed and the way people find information. I’m going to give you an idea of the basic keyword concepts one should follow, while developing dynamic or web 2.0 content on their websites.

1. Keyword authority sculpting
   Keyword authority sculpting is nothing but making sure that the entire copy looks natural to search engines (and humans) by evenly placing keywords at the most important places or nodes in the whole copy text, enabling the webmaster to help the search engines determine their importance and authority.
   For example, your keyword is “red flowers”. First the webmaster have to identify the nodes in the whole copy text, to determine their importance and relevance. This could be elements like H1 tags or STRONG tags. Based on their importance, relevance and priority, place the keywords maintaining individual keyword densities at the nodes. Take a look at the screen shot.Here, you can see that the keyword (Atlanta real estate and it’s variants) is being populated in the whole ad copy in a very high ratio. In fact, the competition for this keyword is really high which is why the keyword density is too high.
   Now, it’s easy for the search engines to make out whether this is spam or not. But where this copy wins is, in the fact that, the keyword is being sprinkled evenly utilizing the importance of other elements on the page. Therefore, the keyword using all it’s variants is being sculpted deliberately to generate an authority to itself which is being passed on to google.
2. Keyword combat
   Earlier you were taught about keyword research - remember ? In order to get maximum traffic to a site, first you need to find out what are the keywords and it’s synonyms that are being searched on the engines by real humans. Pick them up and make copies on it. Simple right?
   But, things have moved on from there. Today, you need to do a bit more research. Research on the types of keywords that are being optimized by competition. How do they rank? What are your scopes of intruding into that territory?
   It’s easier than it sounds like believe me. Many a times, you can get your set of keywords by analyzing the first few competition itself
   Essentially, get the set of keywords that are worth your time, study the patterns on the competitor’s website, see the opportunities and than bang ! Make sure that it does not end with just finding that one “traffic generating keyword”.
3. Keyword variation
   Imagine if your keyword was XXXX and you kept repeating that word every single line to maintain a good keyword density?
   In fact, many “SEO gurus” are doing it. And that’s only what they can do - nothing beyond
   My advice is to find the variations of your primary keyword, find the best combinations with other synonyms as the most searched related keywords of it and make a formula that will work for you.
4. Keyword channels
   Keyword optimization does not end with keyword density checks on a single page or a set of pages. On the older sites, it used to work but not anymore. Search engines know that you’d place the keywords deliberately in your copy and optimize for them. So they look for other options.
   Another way to let know the search engines of your keywords and it’s relevance is by following a pattern in your site structure. Sounds weird? Glad it did.
   Different pages on your website have different authority and importance (Not just Page Rank). As a webmaster, you’ll need to find out as to which are the ones that’s up on the priority list and which are down. Then, doing a keyword study on each page would reveal you as to where are the places you have left untouched and where have you placed the wrong keywords. Find it, and work towards channelizing the keyword importance. Decide for yourself creating a combination of the most important keywords and authority pages. The right mix will give you the best results.
5. Keyword neighborhoods
   The idea about keyword neighborhoods is that while selecting keywords for your website, it’s easy for you to just go about selecting the most traffic generating keywords with the help of a keyword selection tool. True. But what you’ve got to notice here is that, the same keywords that were shown to you might have been taken (or is being researched on) by another webmaster. You don’t want to waste your time optimizing on that keyword. Meanwhile, smart work would be to research on the keywords that are already being optimized, find out as to what the theme of those sites are. How do they relate to your primary keyword. An are those sites in the “bad neighborhood” or not?
   If they are, you might want to skip that keyword and move to another fresh one. (Real smart guys would find an opportunity here too.) This point may not help you to really help you move up the SERPs but, it will help you stay out of bad company and not waste your efforts.

Some geeks in Kerala, and around Technopark, have been thinking about this for quite some time now, and they have come to a conclusion.

The Blogcamp Kerala is suggested to be in June 2008, and things are going to be bigger than ever.

While the team is not teling us anything more than that there’s surprise around the corner, I’m assuming that’s going to be sweet. There have been invitations and replies flying off from outside the country even. Hmm…sounds really big! And I also hear that talks are out with Kerala Tourism guys for a major sponsorship.

Check out the buzz and the participants here, here, here and here.

I think I’ll make it this time around.

And, I coudn’t resist designing these posters.

Photo credits - Charles Haynes,blackfin2,Martinthomas1

More and more websites and blogs are getting the google sitelinks these days. I’ve noticed some of the popular ones being awarded the sitelinks, which were not having them earlier. I’m guessing this could be as a result of a recent tweak in the google algorithm.

My guess is that the sitelinks are appearing only for direct searches for the sitename or brand. Like “Dailyseoblog” or “labnol” or “andy beard”.

Google seems to have tweaked their algorithm probably in the belief that one who searches for the particular brand or blog name is likely to already know about the service/product and it makes more sense to provide the searcher with relevant information from the blog/site.

Since Google have introduced the “Search Box” feature where a search box appears directly in the search results for that particular website, I think the next step will be to reach that point - to have the search box in the search results itself.

An interesting piece of info here. If you search for “John chow” (who you already know that is kicked off Google SERPs), you’ll get Johncow.com with the sitelinks. Cool huh?

So far, I’ve seen many popular Indian blogs to be awarded the sitelinks, like Labnol, Kiruba, Clazh, Reviewsaurus etc. Have you had one too?

Meanwhile if you’re looking for information on sitelinks, check here.

I thought I might be the only guy who prefers it. In fact, it was an easy guess to me that it would die out soon as any other social media mushroom. But the fact that it managed to get into the good books of many and stood face up to the criticism made me like it more.

ChrisG liked it and I completely agree with him. It has all the features, carefully planned to take down Digg (I assume). Community, UI, Ease to handle, Content - everything is just rich enough to take down any existing social media site. Some of the features made me think - “Why did not Digg implement this earlier, or why aren’t they?” Now, if you compare Digg to Mixx, clearly there are differences that puts Mixx on the forefront.

1. Digg takes more time to submit a story.
   Digg
   A normal story submission process on Digg will take me 2 minutes or more, since there are more clicks involved.
   - First the waiting screen.
   - Second, I’ve to write a description myself and select from a picture.
   - Third, select a category.(No miss here)
   - Four, Enter Captcha.
   - Five, Submit.
   - Six, Duplicate check.
   - Seven, final submission.Mixx
   A normal story takes lesser time to submit, with lesser clicks.
   - First, submit URL.
   - Duplicate check.
   - Three, title and description automatically filled.Select category,tags (optional)
   - Four, Submission.

2. Digg wastes my time and confuses me during a submission
   Ssince it checks for duplicate entries only after I’ve taken time out to write a description about the story. While MIxx checks for duplicate content even before you provide the description, and quickly after you’ve submitted the URL. Makes sense this way.

3. Digg always aks for a captcha, Mixx requires it only when they find you submitting stories too frequently.
   This probably may have something to do with the traffic and spam ratio. But as a end user, I’m not bothered about it, I’m worried about my time, my effort and how easy the process is. Digg fails here.

4. Digg is Spam, has no room for development
   Digg is controlled by the mafia you know it. There is very little or No chance at all for fresh stories to get popular, however good it is, unless you have the help of the mafia.
   Mixx is all new, there is lot of quality submission done and every one gets appreciation. Again, down the line Mixx may become like Digg, but as of now, it’s pretty good.

5. I can’t find an appropriate category on Digg, Mixx has better categories
   It’s a shame that Digg has no apt categories for submitting blogging related stories or niche topics like it. You have very narrow choices that doesn’t make any sense at all. Everyone can’t be running a TV station or a Gizmodo to break stories. Why don’t they understand it?
   On the other hand, Mixx has got a better array of categories, and even if you fail to find one, there’s the option of tags. Which is awesome!

6. Digg throws up stories that it thinks is interesting. Mixx shows me stories that are of interest to me.

7. Digg does not have groups and Communities, Mixx has lot of them
   I think one killer feature of Mixx is that it has groups and communities to share your stories according to your taste and preferences. After all, that’s the whole fun in Social Media isn’t it ?

8. Digg is harsh, It thinks some sites are unworthy of submission
   That’s bull s**t. While I tried to submit a story from a nice site, Digg says that the site is banned from submission, and I can’t submit any article from that site, despite them being good articles.

9. Digg is Dull, Mixx is Hot !
   Looks matter after all. Especially when you are spending more time on one site , you don’t want to strain your eyes looking at dull and pale colours. Mixx on te other hand has got soothing colour scheme for your eyes, not too bright not too dull, just perfect with the best UI and user friendlyness.

So those are the nine points I think makes me prefer Mixx over Digg. Hope they make sense. If you really like Mixx, feel free to join The Mixx Fans group and get the company of the most passionate mixxers.

Andy has an interesting article on how to increase your blog readership with 20 hot tips. Must read.

Social Media and networking is not interesting all the time. Ace “social media enthusiast” and “Link builder” Lyndoman thinks that social media is NOTworking and not Networking. Interesting article there.

Caroline Middlebrook has an interesting article on hitting the right balance of work. She says too much work is bad and so is too little work.

Amit Agarwal made an interesting observation about the Lynx love from Google. Amit is ppular fr finding such un noticed errors and mistakes and this  one I really enjoyed.

Jude Festus thinks you can make money from your Orkut profile - well, I’m not sure if it’s a good plan, but check it out and decide yourself.

Arpit has a post that explains you how to check for viruses online on files. Sounds stupid? It’s real. Check out.

Other cool things

There’s a Twitter enthusiasts meet up happening in Chennai this March 23rd, Sunday. If you’d like to join, hop in !

Wondered how to check your blog looks like on various browsers for operating systems like mozilla, safari, flock, etc and at different resolutions?

You might ask your friends to do it for you, but when you have a free online tool that checks your blogs look on various resolutions on various browsers, why go for the tedious way?

Browsershots is a cool handy online tool that helps your blog to be seen on many browsers like Firefox, SeaMonkey, Navigator, Galeon, Opera, IE etc. The good thing is that it throws up previews of your blog on the above mentioned set of browsers on various resolutions and on various operating systems like Ubuntu, WIndows XP, Windows 2000, PLD etc.

It’s a fantastic tool, that’s free and completely genuine. Check it out here.

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.