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.

Hey easy.. take down that frown on your face. This article is nothing about any black hat SEO techniques. Well, it has got shades of grey, but it is fair  and it is completely legitimate.

Hmm, let’s put it this way. It’s about manipulating the SERPs to your advantage using the SERPS itself.

Example: You have a keyword that you want yourself to rank high on. Unfortunately, there are lot of established sites which rank high for that particular keyword. So, the chances of you breaking into the top is bleak and it may take several trial and error methods and indefinite time.
But you have this cool new way by which you can simply break into the top 1, 2 or 3rd position and if you wish all of them for the same keyword. Sounds interesting? Hop on!

I’ll call this method “Carbon Copying SERPS”.

It goes like this. Take the keyword for example “free wordpress themes”. This keyword has a high traffic volume.

If you do a search on Google for “free wordpress themes” then it would give you all the established sites on the SERPS. Please don’t mistake when I say established sites.

I mean the ones, which has an advantage of

- having it’s content propogated more quickly,
- having the maximum number of incoming links,
- having more references on anchor texts with the keyword
- with an older domain name etc.

To beat them in a short span of time is difficult.

And you have a fairly new website for which I assume that the following points are ticked off.

- Is indexed on the SERPS.
- Has a decent level of authority for content.
- Has good content and some fair amount of link juice.

Now, what we would do is go to all the established sites, and research on what their content is. See if we can trace a pattern out of it.

Have they provided images?
Have they listed the themes in numbers?
Have they done SMO?
Have they written enough textual content? If yes in what pattern?

Research on as many as the metrics as possible, mostly on site optimization metrics. Because this is the only area where you’d be doing some homework.

Now goto your blog and start designing .

- Design a layout that gives maximum leverage to on site optimization factors.
- Make a list which is SEO friendly. (Food for thought*)
- Make a list of all the best sites on the SERPS, offering “Free Wordpress themes”.
- Give them thumbnail images or snapshots.
- Write SEO friendly textual content on the list for the thumbnails. (Again food for thought*)
- Use extremely attractive headings. (Food for thought*)
- Package it really well.

By now, you should have a SEO friendly website, with a SEO friendly design, with the best content on the selected keyword, with the best compilation and the best copy.

Now go to and fro on the content, MAKE SURE there is no duplicate content on the copy at all. Redraft the content and make it a attractive package.

Now, submit the article to the social media sites. Digg, SU and the like. This is easily said than done.
In fact, to be honest with you, this is the catch of this trick. There is no guarantee that everyone who did the above steps exactly will make it to the top unless they do the social media part correctly. I can even say, one who does the social media submission part correctly will win.

Some interesting points here.

- You might have designed a great copy, but you suck at SM. You lose.
- You have extremely good content, something like the WIkipedia, there is no Viral marketing flavor in your copy. You still lose.
In fact, the offsite optimization part of the game will be taken part of the Social Media while you sit back and relax.

So, essentially what you’ve done is -

Selected a keyword, picked the best sites that has ranks high on it, studied the pattern, created a list from it, made excellent on page SEO factors to support it, fed it to the demons !

So, it’s not all that grey as I suggested right? And there is a bit of that retarded SMO thingy too. Having said it, I’m not sure if this will work for all keywords. It does for certain type of “numberable” content though.

What is that one thing that keeps buzzing in your mind when you write an article?

I want to impress my reader.

Well, I could be wrong, as there might be other things that matters to you but I don’t think anyone can neglect this factor.

We all want to impress our readers, and mind you you would want to do it the very first time, in the least time, and every single time. (Bad rhyming eh?)

So how can you impress your readers?

• You got to know very clearly who’s reading your article
  Analytics experts may call it target segmentation or customer profiling whatever whatever, beyond the jargons it just means that you got to know who your subscriber is.

  Two possibilities here -
  If he is your friend/well wisher, you are safe. You can go on writing about things that you are not sure of and he’ll probably excuse you and encourage you to study more on the subject.
  If it’s not your friend, you are still safe. You can go around writing about things that you are sure of and he’ll poke his nose into it, just because he is irritated. He’ll do it anyway!

• You got to know what you are talking about
  You don’t have to write about something just because someone else is writing. Write about only the things that you are comfortable with, and it will show through whether you are faking it or not. Remember readers are good judges.
• You need to have a firm stand on your decision
  It’s easy for anyone to go confused, because there are lot of opinions about a single matter. And you don’t know whom to stand with. Follow your heart and stick to what you think is right. People disagree with you because they think they can make you feel guilty, but you know you never will.
• Get opinion form your friends before you make a statement
  When you are unsure about something, say a topic like “iPhone is better than Windows mobile or not”..ask your friends. Non geeky friends can sometimes give you excellent pointers to something that you have missed. Brainstorming is the key.
• Give your readers something to take home
  Why should someone read your blog? Shouldn’t they benefit from it? Give them something to take home, like a unique information, a unique perspective about something normal.
  Though they’ll not let you know, they’ll take it home and come back often.
• Be creative and think out of the box
  Like this paragraph, where I’m writing nothing but just blah-blah about nothing just to fill the 4-5 lines of this paragraph so that it looks like the other paragraphs which may have some information. Now this paragraph sits right along with those paragraphs( repeated 5 times now) and most of the readers who skims through articles doesn’t even notice it, except you. They would’ve read the title though.
• Be friendly, if all were gurus where are the listeners?
  Think about it, are you a guru or a listener? If everyone talked like they were gurus in their own niche (which they might be), then who would care to listen? Everyone would have their own “10 principles of success” to preach about. So cool down, there’s nothing wrong in being a listener, be a friend and talk in modesty to your readers and they’ll reciprocate it.
• Be Honest
  I like Darren because he is honest.I know you like Darren because he is honest.  Millions like Darren because he is honest. See how a small virtue can affect many in exactly the same way? Practice honesty. Even if it gives you small set-backs every now and then it pays in the long run.
• Laugh at your mistakes
  I end up laughing every other hour or so. Damn!

Having said all that, it’s true that you cannot impress everyone. If you are set out to please everyone and get them smiling to whatever you say, you are in the wrong gear. Leave space for some criticism,it will give you room for growth.
Photo courtesy - Mudcat

One way links, the reward you get for great content and creativity at the blogosphere. You’ll do anything for it isn’t it? (The title was only an eye-catcher, so relax..)

Well, an idea just popped into me, while I was reading Michael Martine’s blog. Michael has a list of testimonials written on one of his sidepanels, and it has links to people who wrote it. It is on the homepage and has excellent screen presence. Get the idea??

Yes, writing testimonials about other bloggers would be one great way to get quality incoming one way links. No expense, no trick, nothing evil!

But what you need to be careful about is,

- Whom you are writing for.
Don’t go around writing testimonials for ever tom,*(beep)*, and harry. Write quality ones for the really good guys.

- Do they accept testimonials?
You can write testimonials only if some one is accepting them isn’t it? Find bloggers who accept testimonials, or who are likely to accept a testimonial.

- Don’t flatter them,but write a testimonial
Don’t simply go ahead and flatter them, it would create a negative image for you. Test their services/read their blog and go for a sincere review. I’m sure many of the professional bloggers would accept honest criticism that will help them grow. Anyone can make out flattery from the rest.

- Ask them a link back
If it’s got to be a win-win situation, ask them for a link back. There’s nothing wrong in it. If they are impressed with your testimonial, they’d be happy to link back.

Hey, anybody care to write a testimonial about DailySEOblog? What ? No takers?

Scrapers/ Sploggers and copy cats are the names you’d never want to hear these days. Simply because every blog has a splogger who’s scraping your content from the RSS feeds everyday.There are lot of tools available to fight scrapers, and here’s a brand new plugin for Wordpress that’ll help you to fight scrapers.

It’s the categories Autolink plugin - which will help you to link automatically to your category whenever there’s a citation regarding the category in your articles.  

How this helps fight scraping?
This plugin will automatically link to your categories whenever there’s a mentiona bout the categories in your posts. Which means more interlinking of pages and categories. This is one excellent way to fight scrapers. When they scrape your content, the interlinks to your blog is also copied, which helps you to trace them out.

With the new Google PR updates, I thought this might be the right time to go for the site redesign I’ve been planning for quite some time. So here it is!

Daily SEO blog will now sport a new look. The new theme highlights content along with advertising options which was limited in the earlier design from Scott. It was an excellent theme with highly semantic coding and cross browser compatibilities. But the advertising real estate options were limited in it.

This theme is a free one called Green Wave 1.0 from Romow. I hope it runs smoothly, if at all you come across anything worth noting, please do let me know.

Everyones carrying a digital camera these days. And everyone’s clicking lot of pics too. Where do you store these files?
If you prefer your PC that means you are going to run out of space sooner or later. You would be using flickr or picasa otherwise..but there’s storage limit for free users at these services too. Have you tried making good use of these photos other than storing it online and sharing it with your friends? May be printing your friends picture on to a tea cup and sending him on his birthday? Cool isn’t it?

Picsquare is an online portal that helps you to do just that. And if you are in India it’s damn cheap too (I wouldn’t be promoting it otherwise). To print your photo on a tea-cup, it costs only Rs 299 and to print on a T-shirt it costs only Rs 399/-. That’s cheaper than you thought I bet!

Picsquare accepts credit cards, but I’ve had a few glitches the first time i tried to order a coffee-cup. But they were quick to sort it on intimating about it on email. I think this is a very good application and an excellent idea for Indian startup , when there are a lot of NRIs who would want to gift personalized gifts to their folks in India.

The site is neatly designed, even though from the SEO perspective, like all Indian startups, it does not perform well. There is unwanted clutter of script on the landing page and keywords(if at all any) are not highlighted.

But a cool service, you must try.

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.

Enhanced Google Image Search, is an opt-in option/ tool in the Google webmasters central dashboard, available to webmasters for making the images in their sites more visible to the Google search engine. And thereby increasing the chances of incoming organic traffic through Google image search.

How to?

To make the images in your site available to Google images enhanced search feature, tick select the option in Webmasters central.

• Sign in to Webmaster tools
• Click the site for which you want to enable enhanced image search.
• On the Diagnostic tab, click Enhanced Image Search.

What does it mean to opt-in to enhanced image search?

If you choose to enable enhanced image search, Google will use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

1. On opting in Enhanced Image search,
   - Google makes available the images in your site (which have the public access ) to Image Labeler tool.
   - The Google Image labeler tool will assign users to keyword the images on the website and the most favored or matching keywords will be assigned to the images.
   - Any queries matching the keywords (assigned by Google) will throw up pages from our site on Google images search.
   - Google follows a complex algorithm that helps them decide images from which site is be ranked higher to another in the image search results. Much of this has got to do with the normal SERP’s ranking factors combined to the user keyword tags assigned to the images.

Recommendations

- Google Image labeler is an excellent tool available to help increase the visibility of your image on Google image search.

- Although there is ambiguity over how efficient would the user generated keywords/tagging be.

- Also, if the website follows the normal onsite image optimization procedures like ALT tags, Longdesc tags, Text surrounding image, image name, URL etc, they are enough to give the visibility required on the SE’s.

- Google Image labeler also poses the threat of competition corrupting the search results by using improper/meaningless keywords to your images through Google Image Labeler.

Opting in Enhanced Image search is a good option to give that extra visibility to our images on Google. I think it is more suited for small scale websites (or sites selling retail products) that does not follow onsite optimization procedures for Images and make it difficult for crawlers to copy the content from the sites. For blogs that uses less images compared to a normal website, it will bring very less traffic.

Sources
Google Support SeoMOZ Webmasterworld Googlewebmastercentral

Here’s Part 1 if you missed it.There, we talked about your own domain name, traffic, related content and space.

Let’s go further deep.

5 - Do you network?
Are you the type who socializes at the blogosphere? If not, start doing it today. Cos, that’s the new mantra of blogging. Although you may have an excellent blog with exclusive articles, it’s no good if you are a loner and you don’t link to people around.By networking i mean linking to others, participating in other blogs, commenting and the like.In short, you have to interact with people around, accept them, review them, comment and make sure your posts are read.Without networking you are cut off from the loop and you stand no chance to win the game.

6 - Incoming links from neighbors?
Incoming links are not just page rank boosters. They are votes given by others. Only if they find you reliable will they ask someone else to visit your blog - else they are taking a risk. In order to make sure that you have a blog where people are ready to click on your ads, make sure you are linked from those blogs that are already playing well.You know the blogs that are doing well in monetization, so keeping a smooth flow from them to yours(by getting links through their articles) will ensure that the same kind of enthusiasm will be maintained by the visitors in clicking the ads on your site, just like the way they do it on their site(provided other factors are in place).

7 - Target?
Study your target inside out. Who they are, where they are from, what is their age group and what are the pages they visit most on your site and which are the ones they don’t.This will help you to identify the kind of ads that will be accepted by your visitors. Suppose the most visited page on your article is your about page, you might want to consider giving more ad-space there.If you have a target audience of the age group 16-22, you might want to select affiliate ads that cater to them.

8 - Credibility factor
This comes in as a result of many factors combined. You are responsible to create this on your own, there is very little that others can do.This counts right from the attitude you show in posts, language, contact details provided on blog, how you interact with others, replying to comments/emails, being consistent to an idea and the like. Viewers can easily make out any deviation from the above factors and will result in instant dying of your readership. While on the other hand, if you have readers who trust you and think you are reliable, they will click on the ads you show too.