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.

Let’s talk today about good and bad menus first. Good menus are those that are SEO friendly, bad ones are those that are not. Simple logic.

When dealing with clients, one thing that’s common to all, is about the use of fancy javascript navigation menus, that troubles me most. If you use one, please refrain from using it. If you are a blogger, there is very little chance that you are using one. But the JS enabled menus are mostly found in portfolio like pages.

A few words about portfolio pages. They are a gold mine for onsite optimization, there would be many wrongs. They are all frills and no stuff. They are stupid. They make lot of noise.

Many a times, they have this animated JS enabled menus that are not crawlable by bots. Big mistake and out subject of talk today.

Crawlers by default, avoid anything that’s Javascript enabled and Ajax. This is one fallback of modern crawlers, even the google one. They haven’t deviced a technology that will help them crawl the contents of JS enabled elements on a webpage and AJAX. They had a problem with Flash, but it is almost rectified now.

• Javascript/AJAX powered navigation menus may look cool and attractive to the eyes, but avoid them whereever possible. Instead use CSS and you could create almost similar spectacular and eye-catching menus.
• Don’t use images for making menu images, instead try CSS, it’s cleaner, quick and easy to manage.
• If it’s completely necessary, keep the JS menus, but submit the linking pages to google.
• Avoid sound effects please, it’s so 90’s!
• Use text to link to pages in the navigation menus if possible.
• Place the navigation menus wither on the top, or the left hand table, or at a place where crawlers won’t miss it.
• Don’t embed them in frames - big mistake!

So the idea is that Navigation menus should be simnple, crawlable, easy to navigate and thus serving the purpose. Let them not be too fancy, complex and JS enabled. It defeats the purpose.

You can find excellent resources on making CSS Navigation menus here
CSS Tutorials on Navigation menus CSS Menu help High quality CSS Menus

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 !

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haloscan is a commenting tool available to make your commenting requirements easy. This tool is particularly helpful for blogger/blogspot users since the commenting feature on blogger is not that very manageable. Haloscan offers editing and deleting option for comments while blogger doesn’t. I’ve been using haloscan commenting on my blog for quite some time. But steve(bloggingtips.com) suggested that i would get more comments had i installed the comments form on the same page.But this is not possible with the haloscan tool. It will open the comments on a pop up window(as you might have already seen).

Now i researched on how to get haloscan comments to be embedded n the same page but in vain.Although i cam across these posts on how to implement haloscan on post page, but again there were glitches. Also, thanks for opinions from jackbook.
I’ve now deviced a workaround for implementing haloscan comments on the very same post page. The pop up window that shows the commenting form is now available on the post page.

Here’s how i did it.Use this code where you want the commenting form to appear.

(script src=”http://www.haloscan.com/load/youraccountname” type=”text/javascript”)(/script)
(span class=”post-comment-link”)
(script src=”http://www.haloscan.com/comments/youraccountname/<$BlogItemTitle$>/?m=1″ type=”text/javascript”)(/script)
(/span)

Now, replace the “youraccountname” with your account id on haloscan(your login id).And replace all the braces with arrow brackets(<>)

Let me know if this works.

I was thrilled to download and install the new Safari Browser for windows today.

As proclaimed it is the fastest and the safest browser around. It is said to be 1.6 faster than firefox and 2 times faster than IE.
True that may be, it handles javascript and image loading pretty quicker than FF or IE.
Safari handles page elements pretty quicker making the user feel a faster browsing experience.
Honestly, being a firefox user, i could not find the functionalities and “power browsing” experience with Safari though the user friendliness is great - just like a Mac.

I admit that any FF user will not find the sudden change seamless, but let me list out what i found awkward.

• It misses the status bar.
  Instead, the page load status is shown in the url bar itself. But i could not find any link previews there, not anywhere else either. Disappointing! So i have to click a link blindly to see where it will take me. That is not a good security feature. Is it?
• Font smoothing.
  With the default font smoothing option turned on, i could not stand all those bold items they were simply blaring out! Tried to turn the smoothing down to “lite” but still it would blare out. Probably that’s the Mac standard bold lok, but i don’t think any FF/IE user can stand it. It seems like Four times the normal strong attribute to the font.
• When you maximize the browser, it over rides the previous run application on windows. In FF or IE hitting F11 enables you a full screen preview, here maximizing the application itself puts you on a full screen view(the footer is still there, unless it’s on auto-hide).

I think this is deliberately done, so that all windows users get a taste of Mac OS, and hopefully it may get popular among them.

Now the killer thing - Safari crashed twice in 14 minutes during my browsing experience - both times when i was using the Google Reader. Booohoooo!!

But i really liked the minimalistic view and the popout message animation. For every message, a slip juts out from the title bar - it’s the classic Mac thing anyway!

On the whole, the safari browser did not meet my expectation. So thumbs down. but hey, it came out with a prima bail remember? It’s the beta version. Okay, Steve, I’ll wait for the full version.

There’s a new widget in town - Line buzzzzzzzzzzz !!!

Honestly, i think this is a cool one. Basically it’s a commenting tool, but with a difference. You can highlight any text on any blog and paste a comment near it. It stays there like a pin-up(when clicked) and others can reply to you as well.

All you need to do is add a tiny javascript to the blogger code.

Okay, now the negatives!
I wish if it was more light than it’s now. Well, it is light but may be it’s the color(which you can’t change) and the heavy box that appears where you add the code. I think they could’ve avoided it.

My suggestions for change would be -

- Take off the comments box that appears on the blog, you don’t need it.
- Text underline should be a bit more prominent with customizable colors.
- Instead of the comment box that appears where you paste the code, it could’ve been a simple credit line or so - the current one simply sticks out.

Otherwise, it’s a great tool.

One more reason to prove why Search Engine Optimization, is a much studied discipline(thanks to bloggers) in India, and why there are many SEO educated webmasters - I find anyone who is approaching me for links, well informed about the need for back links, PR, Google SERPs etc. This is really fantastic! Well, Here are the Quick links of all the new bloggers who have linked to Daily Dose with the anchor text - Mani SEO Services india, the last week.

• Rahul Prabhakar - when the muse strikes
• SEO Kolkata blog
• Technorati Fav Exchange links - Light within, Technix

You may link to daily dose with the anchor text - “SEO Services India” or “Mani - SEO Services India” from your blog, make sure that the link is not a javascript enabled pulldown menu but a simple HTML ahref link.The link will be reciprocated the very next week.