There was this interesting thread on Sitepoint forums, where a travel blog was advertised as for sale. It’s PR 6, so I thought I may buy it and headed to the details. Found that the site is www.richardsturner.com and immediately dropped the idea.

Okay, that was a fast forward of what really happened. Let me unfold the story.

Sitepoint is a great place to buy and sell online properties. If not tried it yet, do have a look. What interests me there is the “Established sites for sale” thread, where lot of great online resources are for sale (I thought I already told you that.)

Now, if you are trying to make money online with AdSense and some SEO work, there is an alternative to your “post daily - earn daily” methodology. Of course, you know that building a great website will take almost 6 months time and that too with good posting frequency and steady traffic. But, if you are after the money part, this is a risk you take. There is no guarantee that the site will do well and your hard work may not pay off, well if it does the world will know you, but yea, just thinking otherwise.

A better alternative is to find a great website, on a niche you are comfortable working with, and buy it with both the hands. Now, that’s smart work ! Well, before you buy, you may have to check a few basic details.

Now, the point here is (regards to the earlier case), the blog was on a good niche - Travel, something that I always wanted to experiment with and also the site had a reputation. PR6 is not too bad, is it?

Well, the prob here are two things.

1 - The site had a personal touch to it.
Richard Sturner, in whose name the site is about, is no longer associated with the blog. Boooooo ! That put me down in the first place. I’m not sure if readers will associate with the brand after the sale or not.

2 - The site had been selling links on TLA.
Boooooooooooo!! So that means your page rank is going to get screwed and you might be taken off the SERPs, and that’s indeed a huge risk.

So essentially, if your site had a personal brand, like your name/photo, on your blog and worse if you had your name as the domain, it’s better you not sell the blog. It makes sense to keep the domain to yourself, but if at all selling the blog, let that not be public. Because, your readers may be sticking to your blog because of your expertise and once it is not there, readers simply don’t see the point in following it.

Sitelinks are more common these days. Popular blogs and websites have been awarded Google sitelinks recently. Google’s explanation is that this is a completely automated phenomena and there’s nothing one can do do help the sitelinks appear for his/her site on the Googel SERPs.
Daily SEO blog has a sitelink and there are some random links on it. See screenshot.

Now, what appears on the sitelinks is completely up to to the Google bots to decide. I can’t see a definite pattern on the links appearing on the sitelinks but yes one of the factors that decides it is the “Popular searches”.

I’ve found from my referral codes and content popularity checks on Google that the pages to which Google has placed the sitelinks are the most popular pages on searches from Google.

Example, Upcoming tech bloggers in India is a post whose content has traveled lot in the blogsphere, and was visited most through search engines and other sources (IM, Email etc). It has some backlinks too (acquired quicker and naturally).

So I think for a link to appear on sitelinks (or sitelinks to appear for that matter) the factors Google would consider are,

1. Popularity of the article/page
   Popularity is considered as the number of times the article has been accessed from the site. Obviously the sitelinks are the ones that are the most popular on that website.
2. Natural link bait or not
   Link bait might be the wrong term for it. But yes, it’s something similar. For an article to get featured on the sitelinks, it might need to be linked most from other websites, at a quicker pace and naturally.
3. Search friendliness
   Another criteria believed to be taken into consideration for a page to be included in the sitelinks is the measure of it’s search engine friendliness/ likeability.
   It can be measured as the number of times the particular article was “searched and clicked on” through the search engines.

Now, what is some page crawled up the sitelinks which you does not want to appear on the sitelinks? What can you do to control the links that appear on the sitelinks?

Here’s what you do.

1. Register at Google Webmaster Central - It’s a shame if you have’t already. Do it now.
   
2. Goto Dashboard > Links > Sitelinks
3. If you have a sitelink, Google will show the existing links for the sitelink and the “block” option
4. Click “block” for those link you think are unnecessary.

That’s it. So even though you don’t have the access to decide what links appear on the sitelinks, you have the access to decide as to whether they should appear or not.

Related reading on Sitelinks at DailySEOblog Article 1,Article 2,Article 3

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

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

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

Do you get an idea there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’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.

What is so special about the theme?

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

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.

The meta tags

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

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.

The Footer

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. 

Essential Plugins

- 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.

About the author

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.

Demo ~ Download theme

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.

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.

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.

As you might already know, titles and title tags are often seen carrying more weight than any other on site optimization factors be it on blogs or static webpages. And I bet, that it’s the one thing all of us tweak mostly to try and reposition yourself on the SERPs.

Well, the liking to the title tag may be due to various reasons.

• It is one of the most easily spotted onsite optimization factor.
• It is easy to tweak it.
• Lots of options are available, which makes it fun.
• It has almost a direct and immediate effect on the Google SERPs.

Apart from all these options, it is also true that it’s difficult to get the right combination of keywords, that will give you the maximum results on the SERPs. So the challenge for an SEO would be to find this right combination and the perfect title tag.

Before going into the perfect title tag, let’s see what are the “don’t do’s” with title tags?

Well, one word would be enough to explain it all - Spam. With all it’s flexibility and weightage, it’s very easy for SEO’s to get high with it and screw it all up. We’ve seen lot of examples in the near future that were “study materials” on how not to write a title. Just go Google down “SEO India” and you will find some really interesting ones.

Now, watching those sites rank high for a particular keyword using the so called “title spam” and “title keyword stemming”, would naturally throw this question across to you - “Why can’t I do a keyword spam on the title tag, when it will deliver the results? After all, that’s what my client is keen on.”

Very honest question and a dangerous one at the same time. My answer to that question would be another one?

“How long do you want your site to appear number one-ten on the SERPs ? ”

Choice 1 - A few months

Choice 2 - As long as the site exists

If it’s choice two…..yep you got it right man…you better not spam.

A spammy title tag would look something like “SEO India, SEO services India, SEO Indian, Indian SEO, The SEO India, SEO Indias”.

I must appreciate this webmasters English creative writing skills but seriously this is no better than a high school guy.

“I read it at Aaron’s E-book that you should include your keywords in the title tag so there you have it, all the ten versions of the keyword! ”

Rather than doing good, this kind of practice will give you bad reputation (if not immediately) in the long run.

So what is a good title tag? How does it look like?

A good title tag is

- A healthy one.
- A short and sweet one.
- Both visually and technically appealing.

Now, this is old school isn’t it? We all know that good title tags are supposed to be the short and sweet, non spammy and all that but, when our competition is tough (and they are spamming) how can I make sure that I reap my profits ?

Well, that’s the catch my friend. That’s what makes you unique.

1. Use your keywords “wisely” on the title.
   Just because you heard that you got to fix your keywords on the title, you don’t have to repeat it and make it look like spam.
   Let’s see it like this. Only you know what your keywords are, not your readers. Draft a title so that your readers can’t make out what your keyword are. It should be a carefully drafted copy that “includes” the keywords in a natural way.
   Ex: SEO India, SEO India Services,SEO India outsourcing, SEO from India - NOT good. It shows that your keyword is SEO India.
   Good Ex:- SEO outsourced services in India from - your company name -.
2. Use your competition to your advantage.
   Analyze all your competitors. See if they follow a pattern. If they’re all spammers, you have an opportunity to beat them. See what’s a better copy for you to break into all of their positions. *Food for thought*
3. Makes sure the title makes sense to a reader.
   Read out your title tag to your colleague or friend. See how he responds to it. Don’t just think of all that you can and plug it in.
4. Let there not be just keywords, but synonyms too.
   Synonyms are a great way to build traffic. Repeating the same keywords in combination with other words may get you the spam tag, but adding it with synonyms is a better alternative.
5. Special characters on the title tags.
   Let there not be any complicated characters in your title. I’ve seen people place funny symbols like tilde and ambersand to create a visual impact. In fact it does but reader’s  probably might like you to use, even that much space for some more information. .::[ So use it ]::.

Essentially, titles are like your visiting cards to a site. You can create and print them in whatever ways you like it. But if you really want a information seeker to read/access you, you better give them the information they are looking for and let that be in good, simple and understandable language.