Recently, i had moved from blogger to wordpress - to a new host.It was not a cakewalk and i came across many hurdles while doing so.Yet, I’ve managed to retain my traffic and Google juice.
In the light of my experience, here are a few tips for you to watch out for if you are planning a migration from blogger to wordpress without losing your valuable traffic and google juice..
I’ve tried to make this a consolidated post including the Migration process - The SEO factors involved and coping with the after effects of it.If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Smooth transfer of your posts.
The biggest bottleneck when moving from blogger to wordpress is to move or copy your posts to the new host.
Earlier, there was a plugin to get this done. But now,since Blogger has updated it’s feed - it’s broken.

But, Wordpress has upgraded it’s version(2.2.1 as of today) and the Import feature is now well equipped to import your blogger posts from it’s RSS feed.
So all you got to do is make sure that your WP installation is up to date. If your host provides the old one, grab the latest version from www.wordpress.org and install it yourself.Directions to install Wordpress here

Importing the posts from Blogger
Go to your Wordpress Dashboard > Manage > Import > Blogger

On selecting Blogger, it would ask for granting permission to access your google account.
Login with the email account you blog on Blogger, and click the “Grant Permission” button.
Presto! That’s it. posts imported.

Note
Wordpress imports your posts from the RSS reader.So, if there are any additions to your RSS feeds, like footer text, etc - remove it from the blog feed settings or those text also will appear on your new posts.(For live example, see my posts imported frm blogger, you would see a “Visit the blog for more articles” text beneath every post.)

Tweaking your Wordpress.

Go to your .htaccess file via Control panel>File Manager and make it writable(CHMOD666)
Customize your permalinks

Dealing with Categories - In your blogger account you could have posted articles in multiple lables, so take some time and prune those categories in each post. This could be time consuming but, it helps in the long run.So you better make it right now.

Part 2 - Letting Google know.

After successfully setting up your Wordpress blog and importing posts, it’s time to let the Search Engines know.

- For this, go to your Google Webmasters account and add the new domain there.
- Do the verification as Google suggests.
- Make a sitemap
Create a sitemap of your new site using this sitemap generator tool and save the sitemap.xml file to your new hosts root directory(newdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
- Go to your Google Webmasters account dashboard > Select the new domain > Sitemaps and submit the new sitemap url there.

Now, you have to wait for 3-4 days for the google bots to crawl your site. A smart way to make this quicker is to get someone link to you.

As google crawls the new site, it will show the number of URL’s crawled in the statistics tab. It would be the same as listed in your sitemap.xml file.

Now, check if there are any broken url’s in your statistics. If there are, download the CSV file.

This is again a time consuming task - you got to check all your posts and check for broken links in it and correct it.I can’t find a plugin or tweak to beat it - if you know, please let me know.

Now, that Google has indexed both your new domain and old blogger account - goto the blogger account and delete the blog.

It’s also a good idea to request deletion of content from Google. But I’m not sure if they will entertain it if your blog isa small one, say with less than 100 posts. I really don’t know the criteria by which they decide whether or not to approve deletion from the Index, but they declined me.

Note - Ask all your backlinks(search for link:yourolddomain.com on Google) to correct their links to your new domain. Write them an email - it works!

If you'd like to stay updated with SEO, grab the RSS feed now !What's this?

Here are 10 things you should gear up your blog with, so that when Google bots are on your blog this season update, they award you a high PR.

Get at least 5 real - good - solid -high quality back links.
I could’ve easily made a vague statement like - get more back links. But no - this season, focus on high quality back links.Let they be few but real good ones.

What are high-quality back links?
By quality back links i mean, back links from
- an authority site/sites related to your blogs category.
- a high PR site than your’s
- a site with no bad neighborhood.(Ensure this with every new site that links to you, by checking their incoming links on Google, using the query links:thesite.com)

And, avoid sites
- with too many(more than or equal to the incoming links) outbound links on a single page.
- with hidden text
- with spammy title tags
- with no authenticity
- forums/blogs which are months old only.

Clear up all the broken links on the pages

Atleast, those on the index page(landing page). Broken links bring down your blogs status, and i know how hard it is to keep them from cropping up.You can check the number of broken links on your site/blog using this tool or the broken links status in your Google Webmasters account.
You can download the data in CSV format from there. Take some time off and find the broken links, edit/delete them.This could be paintaking process but i recommend that you clean them all up before the crawlers are on your blog.

Write a meta tag description with a clean(don’t repeat keywords) and attractive copy.If you are on Wordpress, get the All in one SEO pack today and install it. It should help you writing individual META tag DESCRIPTION and TITLE tags for each post.Blogger users can write the META Title and description tag in the Settings itself.

Add ALT tags to your images.
That’s a very often repeated tip. And i don’t think this shold help you much, but it will help you describe your blogs content to Google, if not anything on the SERP’s.
Add ALT tags to every single image on your blog including the subscriber feed button.

Extend your domain name registration.
To a longer period, say 5-10 years.Google values domain names registered for a long time as it suggests that the site is more authentic than one that’s registered for an year or two.

Ensure that on the landing page(for blogs, the front page) your keyword appears at least with a density of 6%, that is if the total number of words on the page is 100, then the keyword should appear 6 times.

Change the BOLD tags to STRONG. Though both tags appear to have the same visual effect, crawlers catch hold of the STRONG tags and the keywords included in it.

Ensure that the title tags of your posts are enclosed in H1 tags. If your template does not support it, either change it or edit the CSS style out.

Trim down your blog roll links if you have one. It does not make any sense keeping 53 links to your friends blogs. Trim them down - keep them to a minimum.

Finally run a simulation test on your blog with this Spider simulation tool and ensure that you have no junk in your code. If the simulation test comes up with lot of CSS code/or junk other than your article content, remove those stuff from your template or try using a different template in which your article appears first on simulation test.

So much for a crash course in SEO to gear up your blog for the upcoming Google PR update.(most likely to happen by August end-Unconfirmed).These 10 step-course should ensure that you in good shape, all geared up for google bots.

The robots.txt file is used to control the crawlers activity on a website/blog. It will help you to keep some directories away from crawling while allowing some. For example if yu have two folders 1.Articles and 2.Javascripts - and if you wish to exclude Javascripts from crawling by robots, then you can command it on the robots.txt file.

A few basics about what the robots.txt file is -
- It is found in the root folder, Ex:-www.google.com/robots.txt
- It’s a text file and can be edited
- It is used to command the robots what to crawl and what not
- It is used to help the crawlers locate the sitemap on your site

If you are on blogger platform, then you can’t upload the robots.txt file. Panic not - there is another option which you can utilize. I’ll discuss it towards the end of this article. First let’s discuss a normal robots.txt implementation on a hosted site.

Implementing the Robots.txt file on a web-hosted site(Wordpress)

Pre-requisites - I assume that you have a wordpress hosted site with Cpanel/FTP access.

- Find the file at your public_html folder. If it isn’t there, create a blank text document.

Excluding a folder from crawling by SE bots.
Suppose you don’t want Google to index one of your folders.
In the robots.txt file, you have to specify two things - which crawler agent(Google, Yahoo, MSN) do you want to keep out and - which folder/folders you want to exclude.

The general syntax to be written in the Robots file is this.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /yourfolder/

Here, user-agent:* means all search agents(Google,MSN,Yahoo etc).
/yourfolder/ restricts that folder from crawling. Note that the sub-folders will not be crawled too.

In order to keep all agents away from crawling ALL folders, use this code.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

You can specify individual crawler agents with their names(replacing *) like google bot,lycra etc.If you are following a general command to all search engine crawlers, keep the * in the user-agent line.

Specifying a sitemap with the Robots.txt file
Due to the recent agreement with the major search engines, they have come up with a common command that they will follow to detect sitemaps from robots.txt file. The command is -

Sitemap: Sitemap url here

Robots.txt for Blogger users.

Blogger users cannot upload the robots.txt file instead, they can use the robots meta tag to control the crawling of bots on particular files.

These codes should be included in the HEAD section of the particular page template.(Enclosed in arrow brackets)

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”

This command will not index the current page in which this code is included.

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOFOLLOW”

This command will not follow/parse the links present on the particular page where this code is present in the head section.Blogger users can use this option to their advantage when making posts.If you want every new page to be crawled by the bots, include the following code to head section of your blogger template.

meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”

Happy driving the robots.

Google isn’t the only search engine online - remember?
Yahoo is somehow neglected while optimising the blog/site by majority of webmasters. Google seems to be the favourite of many, for searching as well as optimising their sites.The reason - the major part of online traffic goes through Google and Yahoo shares only 1/4th of it.

Does that mean that Yahoo be neglected? Not at all. infact Yahoo! can bring you as many visitors as Google, provided you have a strong presence in their index.

Now, how do you make it to Yahoo’s index? 3 ways.

- Get someone to link to you.
- Write comments on other blogs and point the link to your blog.
- Submit a sitemap to Yahoo!

I don’t think further explanation is required for steps 1 and 2. But how do you submit a sitemap to Yahoo?
Hope you are aware that, Google accepts the standard xml format sitemap while Yahoo accepts the text format sitemap. This site offers you a free sitemap in all the four formats. XML,TXT,HTML and ROR.

Now, with the recent collaboration of all the major search engines(Google,Yahoo and MSN) you don’t have to worry about the various formats.All you need is one single sitemap file - in XML format.

How to submit to Yahoo?
- Create a robots.txt file if you don’t have one in the root directory.(See more info here)
- In the robots file, add this line..

Sitemap: your complete url here

Now, this is a universal sitemap recognition standard as agreed by Google,Yahoo and MSN. The respective crawlers will find out the sitemap from this line, where ever it is placed in the robots.txt file.

Here are the best ever Wordpress themes that are SEO friendly.(Updated on Aug 2008)

No messy tweaks and work around SEO techniques. These themes have been tested(code validated) for stability - and SEO friendliness.

I can assure you that they are good for the search engines and the spiders will love them. Many of them are focused on content and simplicity and may not carry unnecessary frills like flash and Ajax. And no fancy stuff too. Just pure search engine love!

The following SEO metrics were taken into consideration when ranking the themes.

• Highlighting content.
• Onsite optimization.
• CSS/XHTML validation.
• Unique SEO friendly page titles.
• SEO friendly layout.
• Optimum coding.
• Look and feel

Steps to completely optimizing these Wordpress themes

Step 1 - Download and install these themes and activate them (as per the general rules)

Step 2 - Though all of them are generally good on SEO, I recommend you also use the 24 must have plugins on them so that you get the edge over others. Remember that million others may also use the themes, so you have to make a difference.

Step 3 - Ensure that you follow the “SEO for Wordpress guide” and change your “yet another wordpress installation” into “super charged SEO blog”

	Template/theme name	Screenshot
1	Your blog 2.0 theme
2	Cutline 3
3	Sodelicious black 10
4	Pop blue
5	Lose my mind
6	Procut 1
7	Big blue
8	Shopaholic Fashionista
9	Fresh Apple
10	Tech 9
11	Limau Orange
12	Modern Paper 1.0
13	Gangway 1.0
14	Blue Earth 1.0
15	01 Dragee 1.0
16	Redie 3.0
17	Magazine 1.0
18	Fleurdelys 1.0
19	Ice 3.17
20	Wp Inspirat
21	Arrow 1.0
22	My journal hypereal
23	Blue Pix
24	Simple la Bob
25	Upstart blogger modicus
26	Box set 1.0
27	The ideal website 1.1
28	Blue Bird 1.0
29	Modern blue Green
30	Colors Idea 2.1
31	Fastway 1.0
32	Unthemed Clean Blue
33	Blue Meanie 1.1
34	Spotlight 1.3
35	Breaking News 1.0
36	Prosumer 1.4
37	Stardust 1.0
38	Techozoic 1.2
39	Classy 1.0
40	A screen near you 1.0
41	Drikattruu 1.1
42	TM Clear N1 1.0
43	QWILM
44	ADReu Theme 1.2
45	Ambient Glo 1
46	Book idea 1.1
47	Genki Theme
48	Shinra house blu
49	Cresto 1.0
50	Deep red 1.0
51	WP Zilla 1.0
52	Emerald 1.0
53	Ajax Berlee 1.0
54	Red Dodo 1.0
55	Simple Theme 1.1
56	SB Blanc 1.0
57	Minus 19
58	Freedom Green
59	PS3Ku 1.0
60	Firstd 1.0
61	Light Col 1.0
62	Mc Mac 1.0
63	Rojo
64	New Yorker 30
65	Liquid 2.0
66	Basic Concept 1.0
67	Patriotic 1.0
68	Natheless 1.0
69	DS Rosa 1.0
70	Non Zero Green
71	Durable 0.2.5
72	Tree V2
73	Cat sitting on a wall
74	Zen minimalist
75	Blue Zinfandel 1.0
76	Bloody gray 1.1
77	Simply Basic 1.5
78	Livingos delta 1.2
79	Insomnia Reloaded
80	Vertigo Squared 1.0
81	FH Freedom Blue 2
82	Karma fruit 1.0
83	Tranquility 1.0
84	Kiwi 1.0
85	Rale 1.0.2
86	Scroller Brown 1.0
87	Clementine
88	New typo 1.0
89	Barracus 1.0
90	Dipdolt white
91	Sammy 1.2
92	TM 3 0.7
93	KISS 1.0
94	Fauxed 1.0
95	Newsday 1.0
96	Orange scale Laila butterfly
97	F nice 1.0
98	Plain text blog 2.0
99	Descent Green
100	Dixie Belle
101	Yakuter Tema

Thinking of submitting your blog to Google? If you’d like a good reputation with Google, make sure you have the following things ready prior to submission.

There are two ways to submit to google. One - the boring way and two - the smart way.

Now, let’s check if your blog is all geared up before the Google spiders visits your blog.

1. Rich content
   Google loves rich unique content.So when the spiders are at your blog, you should keep ready food for them.Write at least 20 quality unique posts in all the categories that you wish to write. Don’t miss any category, let’s make it full and final.Yes, you can add on any pages later, but doing it in a systematic way will only help you always.
   Wordpress users-
   This ensures that Google crawls and index all your category pages(provided there is a post in each category).
   Blogger users-
   Make sure that there is a post under each label.This way the crawler will not miss any category page.
2. Onpage optimization essentials
   Before submitting to google, make sure that you have the onsite SEO tweaks done. If you missed the discussions here, they are Title tags , Permalinks , Keyword density , Footer etc.
3. Outgoing links to quality websites
   There is a common misconception that outgoing links without any incoming links will harm your site’s reputation.True.But if you manage to incorporate some links to credit worthy sites related to your blog’s content, then it makes google easy to figure out your sites content and assign you a category.These trust worthy sites can be wikipedia, google help pages, yahoo directories or trust worthy sites already in your niche.
   - Some quick notes here -
   - Don’t include too many outgoing links, adequate will be 1-2 per post.
   - Link with good anchor text(related to your keyword), not with “here” or “check this”.
   - Do not link to ill-reputed sites or non-related websites out of your niche.
4. No broken links please
   It is recommended that you mend all your broken links before submitting to Google. You can use a broken link checker to help you analyze the broken links in your blog. Trust me, many a times you can’t trust human eyes and it’s wise to use a tool to help you out.
5. Sitemap
   This is not necessary, but it is good if you have a sitemap ready listing all the pages that you wish to index and avoiding the ones you wish to. Wordpress users can make use of plugins likeGoogle sitemap generator, and bloggers can simply use their atom feed as a sitemap.(This can be done later after submitting your site as well.)
6. Robots.txt
   It’s very important. Make sure that you’ve not exlcuded any folder from being crawled or any crawler from crawling your blog.More authoritative ideas on tweaking the Robots file here.

Once, these things are taken care of, it’s safe to go ahead and submit your blog to google, either the boring way or the smart way.

Someone in the DP forums was making a statement the other day that -

You don’t need any SEO if you are on wordpress. It ranks you high on search engines by default.

It is partly true.Wordpress by default is a very Search Engine friendly blogging platform. But when you are in the default mode, that is if you are not installing any plugin, or if you are not tweaking your template - then you are not utilizing wordpress to it’s fullest potential.

We’ve discussed already the SEO tweaks on wordpress template that will give you top ranks on search engines. Here is a compilation of Top must have SEO plugins for wordpress - as an SEO i recommend this to all wordpress users who are serious about making money online and generating traffic to your blog.

• SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong! Download the plugin here
• SEO plugin for Wordpress- A very neat and handy plugin that gives the essential SEO traits to your blog.
• Essential SEO plugin for wordpress from utheguru - Another neat plugin. No mess-ups and no let-downs. But the features list is not that very impressive.
• Sitemap generator plugin for Wordpress - Creating a sitemap is always a safe way to guide the robots. It wouldn’t hurt to have one. This one is useful particularly if you have lot of pages on your blog.
• Meta Editor plugin for Wordpress - As the name suggests, this one gives you the power to edit the Meta tags with more options and with ease. A must have.
• Related posts plugin - This one does not directly control any SEO feature but helps you to increase your visitors length. It shows 10 related posts where you place it.
• All in One SEO pack - This is a killer plugin. As the name suggests it rolls in all the SEO measureables into one whole pack, the title tags, the metatags etc. Must have.
• Best SEO plugin pack - This guy is damn interesting. It’s got a long list of features namely - Feedburner Feed Replacement,Google XML Sitemaps,Head META Description,Ping all services,Share this, WWW redirect etc.If you don’t like to install one plugin each for a feature, use this one.

It’s obvious that you won’t be using all the plugins together(you can’t). But if you would like to use one plugin for all the SEO stuff, then pick All in one SEO. Otherwise, you have all the other small plugins to incorporate to your blog. Don’t forget that these plugins alone cannot give you results, but when combined with SEO tips and tweaks, it can prove wonders!

We have already seen how to tweak your wordpress title tags for search engine optimization.It was easy.
What we did in Wordpress is converted the default option in wordpress where - The Blog Title would be in front followed by the post title to - Post Title - Followed by Blog title.
Ex: - DailySEoblog - How to convert blogger title tag for SEO
to
How to convert blogger title tag for SEO - DailySEoblog

Why should you convert the default title structure?

In the default option - since the Blog title(Dailyseoblog in my case) appears first, the important information(which is the post title) is pushed to the end.There is a chance for the search engines to append this long a title. Also, it wouldn’t look appealing to searchers on google.

How do we change the title tag structure on Blogger so that it’s optimized for search engines?

The same law applies here. Put the main content(Post title) first followed by the Blog Title.
In Blogger, by default the Blog Title would come first.Let’s analyze the code.

Do you find something like this on your blog template?(Dashboard]Template)

[ItemPage][title][$BlogTitle$] - [Blogger][$BlogItemTitle$][/Blogger][/title][/ItemPage]

Change it to

[ItemPage][title][Blogger][$BlogItemTitle$][/Blogger]-[$BlogTitle$][/title][/ItemPage]

(Please replace square brackets with arrows>< )

Save and republish. Now, what we’ve done is brought the Item page title(which is the blog post title) to first place and pushed the Blog Title to the end.

The results should like like this.

BEFORE - YOURBLOGNAME-YOUR POST NAME
AFTER - YOUR POST NAME-YOURBLOGNAME

Now, that’s one more reason for your blog to gain edge over other bloggers and rank high on search engines.

This is the second part of Free SEO tools list. The first one was Free SEO tolls for keyword research.

1. Broken Link Checker - This tools scans your blog for broken links. Very effective tool.
2. Total Link Analyzer - This tool analyzes the blog for external and internal links.Very useful when you have to maintain the balance between external and internal links.Very handy tool.
3. Anchor text analyzer - As you know the anchor text by which you get linked from other sites are vital for your SERPS positions. This tool checks all incoming links to your blog and verifies the anchor text. If you find unworthy ones, you may contact the website owner to change it for you.
4. SE Link popularity - This SEO tool helps you find the number of backlinks for your blog on different search engines. Great to do a monthly check on all the Search engines.
5. Quality Link Assessment tool - This Free SEO tool helps you find the quality backlinks to your site - I love this tool as this really helps me categorize my backlinks. How many edu links, how many gov links, etc.Very effective one.
6. PR backlink checker - This one helps you find out backlinks to your blog for each PR position.

Coming up…

Ensuring that you have a SEO friendly layout is very important because, even if you have great content, and you use a fancy SEO unfriendly wordpress template, then your content may not be highlighted/indexed well on the search engines.

Let’s see what exactly are SEO friendly wordpress templates.

As i had mentioned in an earlier post - a two column template is optimal for feeding food to the crawlers.

Three things to note in the design are -
- What does the crawler see first?
- Does the wordpress template highlight the keywords?
- Does the wordpress template tell the crawler what’s important and what is not?
- Does the wordpress template say “bye” to the crawler?

Enough for creative ideas- let’s go technical!

- What does the crawler see first?

Don’t misunderstand this with what you see first on the page? When a spider crawls your page, it sees the code, and according to the code, what does the spider see first?
It is recommended that the spider sees your articles/post first.And not the category links or sidebar.
To ensure this, there is a neat trick!
Just leave a blank column if you are following a three/two column template at the top.See more instructions here.This way, the crawler will jump to the articles first, and then move to the links sidebar.

Another way to curb this is to use a template with a right hand sidebar.

- Does the wordpress template highlight the keywords?

Okay, so you have a keyword rich title and a keyword rich article. You see yourself on the article that the keywords often repeat, and the ads triggered on Google Adsense too is related to the keyword. Cool!
But do you know if the crawlers see the keywords highlighted?
If you want the crawler to see the keywords highlighted, use the following tricks!
- Instead of BOLD tag, use the STRONG tag to bold the keywords.SE crawlers will ONLY pick up the STRONG tag keywords and will avoid the BOLD tag. So if you are seeing the keywords in bold text, it is only a visual appearance - convert all those BOLD tags to STRONG today, if you want the SE’s to pick up what you want to show them.

- Does the wordpress template tell the crawler what’s important and what is not?

Damn - how do we get that done? Easy. Make sure that your template uses H1,H2,H3… coding for texts.
The idea is such - there are keywords on your blog out of which some are more important and some less important.If you put the text in H1 tag, it means that is the most important keyword and if you use H2…H3 and so forth,the importance decreases accordingly.

It’s like feeding the spider in a course. First the Starter, then the Main course, then the Dessert…you know it’s easy to remember that way.

- Does the wordpress template say “bye” to the crawler?

When the crawler finishes crawling your blog, what does it see(the last thing)? This is your blogs “bye bye” to the crawler.I recommend that you provide the best highlighted stuff at this point. So that the crawler remembers what your site is all about.Unfortunately, many template uses the footer.Big mistake! Use a 2.0 footer with H1 tags and links to your best posts.These will be crawled and indexed with more importance.
Damn - after all why do you want to waste your real estate at the footer?

Now, these four things combined decides if you have a SEO friendly wordpress/blogger template or not.Check today if tour template meets the requirements if not, switch to a new template today. Man, there are lot’s available these days. Isn’t it?