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.
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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.
How important do you think are the page titles on your blog ?
There is a new school of thought in SEO who thinks that they are not important as they were once. And there are people who are not keen on placing their prodcut name or sitename on the title.
I beg to differ. I insist that the sitename/product name/service has to be present on the page title.
Now, the argument from the other side is that, you are being spammy when you put in the blog name or the product name on your page title. Well, actually it is spammy if you want it to be. Otherwise it’s not.
I say spamming is something like this.
“SEO India, Indian SEO, SEO from India, BEst SEO in India, The SEO consultant India”
While, anything along the lines of “Visit Vishnu’s SEO blog - SEO consulting service, India” is perfectly normal.
The idea is like this. If you had an offline business, wouldn’t you put a board outside, so that passers by can know what business you are running from the first look at it?
You’d also place a tag line/name on the board that describes your business in minimum words like - “Vishnu’s Grocery Store”.
Here again, by the title tag we mean to provide maximum information to Google about what you are, what’s your name and what have you got to offer to people passing by so that the interested can come in.
So essentially, title tags and page titles should not be spammy but should take care of the basic intentions of it.
- Let people know what you are selling/what your blog is all about.
- Give them a name or brand to associate with.
- Give them an idea about what they can expect or how will they benefit.
Having said that, it’s easy to compile certain keywords and make it look spammy by repeating them more than once. Please avoid it, try to make it as minimal as possible with the maximum information being displayed.
Here are the best and the top traffic generating keywords tracked for the last month on DailySEOblog.
Many of them are long tail keywords while some are good volume searches and is constantly generating traffic.
All of them are picked form my referral stats. I normally believe in SEOing your site to live searches on Google rather than working towards a fancy keyword like “SEO India” which is easily mistaken for traffic. With these keywords, I get a good amount of traffic each day (see the competition number for each keyword), and I’m happy with it.
I’m delighted to introduce to you - a new SEO friendly wordpress theme from DailySEOblog - “SEO Green” !
We’ve been working on this theme for quite some time now, and after a lot of modification and tweaks, here it is. We’ve managed to make it SEO friendly as much as possible, along with keeping the looks and feel of a contemporary wordpress theme.
This is a free wordpress theme, so feel free to download it and use tweaking it according to your taste.
The simplicity and effectiveness.
The theme is designed keeping in mind the common blogger who is on the look out of a wordpress theme that he can implement once and the forget about. This is for those bloggers who don’t want to think too much and crash their brains about optimizing their site.
The categories are put right on the top of the theme. Now, this is something unusual. You either find the categories on the right hand side or on the top bar header navigation menu. The reason they are put on the top is that you have a good real estate for doing SEO here. Make your categories SEO friendly by using keywords in them and even otherwise your categories are picked up by the search engines by default. Therefore highlight is on the categories, so you may want to tweak them and make them really attractive.
There are no meta tags by default on the theme. Simply because, they have no SEO value at all. Instead I’m using the categories to appear at the description on the SERPs. Once you install the theme, the description text that appears for it on Google would be the categories.
Now, for those who have lot of categories, this may look as spam on the SERPs. For those bloggers I recommend the headspace plugin to be added to the theme and everything regarding the meta content will be sorted out.
It is a common mis-understanding that the meta tags gets you lot of SEO importance while the truth is that it does not (apart form the titles). It does serve the purpose of an Ad-copy that compels people to click on your site while it is appearing on the SERPs.
The header has a logo to the left and the recent comments and the recent posts listed on it. To the right, you’ll find the subscription options. The recent comments and posts plugin is used here keeping in mind that the header should contain as much content as possible to be absorbed by the spiders. I could’ve easily left it blank, but there was a good real estate for SEO, so I thought it might be wise to just use it.
The logo space can also be customized according to your taste, just replace the image logo.jpg in the template directory to get this done.
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The footer has three columns that are very much “tweakable”. The first column contains an about me section where you can add text about you or the site, while adding a photo or logo of yours. The second and third column can be customized to add links, external or internal depending on your taste.
- The theme comes packed with the recent comments and recent posts plugin, please activate it from the the Dashboard> Plugins menu.
- For those who want custom titles and meta info, I recommend you use the HeadSpace2 plugin.
- Any other plugin can be easily added to the right hand sidebar. A demo of plugins working can be seen here.
The theme is designed by my partner designer Prasanth, who have coded the entire code himself, while I bugged him with the SEO metrics.Prasanth helps me with design on my SEO projects.
If you’ve spotted any errors on the theme, please let me know on the comments. I’ll very much appreciate it.Hope you’ll enjoy the theme as much as we liked designing it.
First off a clarification. Links aren’t everything that can get you higher ranks on Google.Yes, links can be the most weighed metric, but it definitely is not the single thing that will help you get ranks.
Somehow, there are many people who are adamant to believe that links are everything. These days, webmasters are very particular about link building and some of them have even collected some dirt and dust in the whole process that it annoys you.
By dirt and dust I meant some common misconceptions about link building. Here goes.
(These ideas were collected from numerous “SEO gurus” who claimed that they are “Link building experts” on a couple of Google groups.)
- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.
- Directory submission is the secret weapon.
- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.
- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.
It is unfortunate to know that many SEO’s agree to the above and in rare cases even get confused.
- Getting as many links as possible to my site puts me higher than someone else on the SERPs.
Completely wrong. Aaron Wall might have referred something along these lines in his SEO book (which was released years earlier mind you.), but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it in these times of SEO 2.0
Sure the volume of links are a great metric that will push you forward but, more than the number it’s the quality that matters. 100 links from different directories is not good while 10 contextual links from blogs can cut the competition.
- Directory submission is the secret weapon.
Did you know that Google keeps an eye on the most popular directories and keeps them off the authority brackets? Aaron did not mention it in his book, as a matter of fact. Directory submissions are only a push factor to your ranks. I think a well crafted mix of backlinks from some real good contextual text and some “respected” directories will make it an irresistible combo while backlinks from directories alone is futile.
- A three way link exchange is the wise mans tool to reap links.
Last day I got contacted by a link building expert on chat. He asked me if I had a PR4 website, I said yes and he demanded the URL (To test if it’s really PR4). On approval he told me that he’ll give me a backlink for which I have to reciprocate another. I denied. He offered me two links for one. I denied again to which he replied - “OK, I’ll give you 3 links”. On denial again he got frustrated. He asks - “Why? I’m giving you three links from different sites and that also theme based !! You won’t get a better offer than this.” :-p
The funda was that he had a network of websites in his belt and every time someone offers a link he goes for a three way link exchange.
Three way (or for that matter any link exchanges) will not work. They are simply a waste of time.
- Get links from “themed” sites it helps you rank better.
Sure it does. But what is the meaning of themed websites? One version is that websites which belong to the same category as your’s are themed websites.
Perfect! It is true that getting links from a site that is similar in content to your’s make sense. But I believe the “theme” thingy should come down to a more refined level. You should talk about the paragraph of text surrounding your link to the “themed”, the keyword proximity and keyword density is what should make your link themed. So, rather than finding a site based on it’s category as listed in the blog directory, it makes more sense to hunt links in similar or related content.
So there you go. Getting links to your site is not a mechanical process, it’s largely natural. As the SEO 2.0(more on that in the next posts) rule goes, a compelling content is your biggest link bait. And of course you can cement together your site strength with other factors such as directory submissions and link building etc. But solely relying on artificial methods to link building is retarded.
Very interestingly, two emails that came in recently to my inbox from the contact form read similar in content though they were from different readers. Both of them requested a free review of their blogs.
One wanted to know the SEO basics that he needed to tweak while other was asking if directory submissions will do him any good. Both of them makes sense, but it hit me with another idea.
Wouldn’t here be many others who’d be interested in their blogs review? If I could find time, I could go through all of them. But due to time constraints, it might make more sense to review at least a few ones.
So, if there are any bloggers out there who want a free consultation on their blogs SEO, do let me know.
You could also let me know by placing these badges on your blog. I could work in preference with those who place these badges on their sites. Feel free to select one. Once you place the links, make sure that you have those questions ready for me. Drop me an email with your site URL, and I should be able to answer your question.
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I hope you’ll ask me meaningful and specific questions like - What keywords to rank for or What link building strategies to opt for. Rather than questions like “How do I make it to the top of Google?” In which case, you’ll land back here.
Doing SEO involves lot of reports and spreadsheets - SEO professionals might agree with me. Link reports, PR reports, SERPs changes, Duplicate content changes and blah blah. Many a times, smaller SEO projects can escape without having any projects at all, but bigger ones definitely needs to be tracked.
To help you with SEO reporting and tracking, you could use SEO softwares.
There is webceo, web position, etc which can handle all the basic tasks pretty decently.
Web CEO has a good reporting system that gives you link anaylyis, competition analysis and keyword research. Although these tasks can be done using firefox plugins and free online tools, webceo’s reporting system is very appealing. It even allows you to send emails of your reports, and create HTML files out of it.
The sad part is that many of these SEO softwares are expensive and webceo even charges a monthly subscription option or a upgradation to pro option. I think it’s really not worth the money though. Especially when there are lot of free SEo tools and LinkDiagnosis tool, which is a pretty impressive tool for link analysis.
Of course there are the array of SEO tools at SEO Book and SEO chat sites that anyone can use without automation of course.
There is a new breed of online SEO project management services like SoloSEO.com, which can completely do your SEO tracking and analysis online for a very nominal price. They promise that they’ll handle keyword management (huh?), content tracking (i hope they mean content generation), link building and the like. I’m not sure if they can add value to what you can do for free with the online free seo tools, but if you are looking for easy automation, services like this one sure comes in handy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Free SEO tools are always popular. Just like Aaron who manages an array of free SEo tools on this domain, there are new guys coming up as well.
When Aaron is dabbling between Keyword analysis tools and meta tag descriptions, which are basic old school seo, there’s this brand new link analysis tool that’s come up. In fact, there could be better and powerful tools around, but this one is packaged well. Take a look here.
What it does.
- It checks for a sites total number of backlinks.
- Also checks the total unique anchor texts and
- Total text
- The pages in your site sorted by Google Juice strength.
- A chart showing the types of links (follow, nofollow etc)
- Most popular anchor texts in your incoming links.
The backlinks are arranged by their Page Rank, the Anchor text used, the number of incoming links to that site , whether the site is good or not and the strength of the link.
I’m not really sure how the last two metrics work. “Link strength” and “Linktype”. Probably link strength checks whether the link is a weak one like the one placed in a sidebar with no contextual text around it or not.
Anyhow it’s a really poerful tool with lot of data assorted in to one single digestible capsule form. The only problem is that it may take a while to crawl and assort your links especially if you have many incoming links. But it’s worth the wait.
Thanks Praveen.