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.

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

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.

But why?

Indexing frequency can be explained as the count or the number of times Google or the other search engines, visit your website to index your content.

And, the higher the frequency, the better you chances for a better rank or your importance in the SERPs.

Can’t believe? Neither did I, once upon a time.

Well, do you know that the best and the top blogs on the internet gets the best indexing frequencies? That is the content published on them gets indexed quicker that anyone else and gets more importance on the SERPs. Examples are TechCrunch.com and Problogger.net.

Content published on TechCrunch and Problogger gets indexed in minutes. The closest we have measured is like around 8 minutes or so. Yeah that’s right, when a content is published on Problogger, it is very likely that the next moment it is on the SERP’s.

At DailySEOblog, I’ve seen content indexed in 30 minutes or so, which is good.

Now the point here is that, if you are writing the same content as the above blogs, like for say example a movie review or so, it is highly likely that even if you have better content, TechCrunch like blogs are likely to get higher on the SERPs.

So they clearly have an edge of having the crawlers index them faster.

Now, how can you get this edge? How can you make crawlers index your content quicker as well?

Several factors.

1. Rapidly changing content.

2. A good sitemap structure.

3. Good pinging tools.

4. Good meta tags that tell the crawlers to visit more often.

5. Easy navigation structure.

Well, so many other factors as well. But these are the best of them I’d say.

Essentially, if you have rapidly changing content, that is made available to the crawlers through a well maintained and updated sitemap, that itself should take care of the problem.

For maintaining the sitemap, of course you’d be using the AllinOne SEO plugin right? That’s a good one.

Also, make sure that you have a regularity in posting. If the crawlers find that your content is being updated on a regular basis, like daily or  hourly, then they will set their crawl frequency(if not manipulated by META tags) to hourly or daily basis, however it is followed on your site.

This is exactly the same reason why blogs have an edge over static websites. It is easy for crawlers to find a pattern in your posts and hence they find it easy to follow the pattern.

You can find more information about this concept over here and here.

Google today announced that webmasters could submit their Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single dedicated host.

So let’s say that you own www.example.com and mysite.google.com and you have Sitemaps for both hosts, e.g. sitemap-example.xml and sitemap-mysite.xml. Until today, you would have to store each Sitemap on its respective host. If you tried to place sitemap-mysite.xml on www.example.com, you would get an error because, for security reasons, a Sitemap on www.example.com can only contains URLs from www.example.com. So how do we solve this? Well, if you can “prove” that you own or control both of these hosts, then either one can host a Sitemap containing URLs for the other.

Google is talking to other search engines so that they too follow and accept this cross-submission sitemap procedure.

Read full story here

Maneesh asks me a question.

My permalink structure is
“/index.php/%year%/%postname%/”
I was wondering if this would have a bearing on my seo efforts.. my site is
indexed with about 5 pages of links on google now..

This question may be of interest to other bloggers(Wordpress guys) too.

Tweaking your permalink structure is the first step to make your wordpress blog SEO friendly. Read how to do it here.  

To answer Maneesh - I see that 10 pages are indexed on Google at the moment from your site. I hope you have only 10 posts on your blog, if you have more, then there’s something wrong, since they are not indexed on Google.

Well, let me clarify something first. There are two issues here.

One - Indexing the number of pages on Google.

Two- Your permalink structure.

Answer to Indexing your pages on Google.

This has very little to do with your permalink structure. All you have to do is create a sitemap and submit it to google. You can find the instructions here.
Within a few days (according to your crawl frequency) all of your pages will be indexed on Google.

Answer to permalink structure.

Your pages appear to be in “almost” SEO friendly nature. The problem I see here is the index.php extension. You should get rid of it.

Go to your dashboard > Options > Permalinks

Select the “Custom” radio button and change the structure to this.

/%category%/%postname%/

or

/%year%/%day%/%postname%/

That should be it.

Bonus tip

If you’d like to submit a sitemap to Google, every time your content changes(new posts) just add this plugin(All in one SEO) and submit the sitemap to Google on Webmasters tool. This should take care of your indexing problems in the future.

Did you know that you can ask your SEO related questions to me through this contact form or by emailing me?

We have an interesting question today from Prashant P. Prashant is a newbie blogger and is looking for answers to the following SEO related questions.

1) How do I get a site listed on top of a search engine. This sounds really silly, I know. But, will it be of any use if I use meta-tag? I have heard, search engine crawlers ignore whats given in meta tag.

Answer: It indeed sounds silly asking that question Prashant. Getting to the top of Google SERP’s is not impossible. A clever mix of strategies that suits you best, can ensure you top ranks on Google. It differs from each site to site. Many of the times, SEO techniques employed are unique optimized content generation, on site optimization, link building and overdoing your competition.

Regarding metatags, Yes it will help you to some extent. But meta tags alone can’t help you straight up the SERPs. Search Engines do not cimpletely ignore Metatags, but it’s no longer a factor that will give you edge over others. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, meta tags improves your blogs quality and increases it’s chance of being clicked from the SERPs by a user. But in the first place you blog has to appear in the SERPS, for that you should rely more on other onsite SEO factors.

2) Will a site get listed higher, if I fill in junk text and hide it? For example, if I have a site on ayurveda can i fill it with random text related to ayurveda and then hiding it?

Answer:This is black-hat-seo. Meaning, it will kill your site or blog if implemented. Google have clearly stated in it’s guidelines that such sorts of back-hat methods can straight take your site down and even banned on Google. Please refrain from the following back hat methods.

- Creating doorwawy pages

- Buying links

- Creating hidden texts

- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords

3) Does every search engine work the same way?

Answer:Yes they work almost the same way. Though they have differences in displaying data (on the SERPs), they collect data more or less the same way.
Example: Submitting a single sitemap through your robots.txt file will ensure that all search engines pick up the same sitemap from your site. But they may take into other consideration other factors and treat them differently before displaying your site on their search results page. Which is why, for the same keyword, you get different rankings on different search engines.

Further reading recommendations: What is Search Engine Optimization?

Hope I’ve answered your questions. Readers who’d like to ask me a question can either ask it through the contact form or email me.

UPDATE - You an ask questions here as well.

Spotted this strange ad on my AdSense ads today. It has a - “Show more” link as well as an “Ad-links unit” combined with it beneath 468×60 banners. Show more ads were seen tested on many websites earlier and is reported here on SEO round table and here on Mashable. Even Ad-link units were seen on may sites reported on SEO round table.

But this combination of Show more links and Ad-Links units together are first time. Any clues on how it would function?

Photo courtesy - Somma

Here is a compilation of all the search engine optimization tips for bloggers ( Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and other platforms) featured here on DailySEOblog. Bookmark this page and you can refer to them any time - honestly quite some of them are really good tips particularly catering to Google, which are not featured elsewhere. Some of them are basic SEO stuff, you may want to have a look.

Importance of primary and secondary keywords - What are primary and secondary keywords? Why should you select them, and how they will help you rank high on search engines.

Five sure shot tweaks to rank high on Google - Must read for bloggers - The top 5 things you should do to ensure high ranks on Google. Only the relevant SEO tips for Google.

How interlinking your pages will help you rank higher on the SERPs - Importance of interlinking, why and nhow should you interlink your pages so that the google bot catches it.

Optimize your Wordpress categories to avoid duplicate content - Wordpress creates a lot of duplicate content by default. Here are tips on how you can reduce it.

Create a user-navigation sitemap for your blog - Crawlers like it - Sitemaps are not only for crawlers, here is how you can create a manual sitemap with ease.

How to avoid duplicate content on Wordpress? - All the tips you need to know on avoiding duplicate content on Google.

User server location advantage to rank high on Google - If you are hosting a website, did you know that the location of your server will help you gain edge on regional search engines?

Optimize the robots.txt file for Wordpress, allow your blog to rank high - Robots.txt is an often ignored file, which is actually an excellent tool that will help you get more files indexed on google and thus rank high. Here ate the tweaks.

Create and submit a sitemap for Yahoo - Sitemaps are different for each search engine, here’s how you can create a sitemap customized for Yahoo in easy steps. 

Tweak title tags of your blog to rank high - Title tags are very important to get search engines attention. here are tips on how you should write an attractive title.

Highlighting your content with a SEO friendly layout - Having great content is not enough. Here are tips on how to decorate it to cater to the spiders.

Importance of footer text in SEO - Footer text is an ignored element which can be used effectively to feed information to the search engines.

How to build a sitemap for large websites and blogs - Building a sitemap for a small blog or site is easy. But if you have a large website, it turns messy. Learn how you can still get a great sitemap ready without mess.

Importance of allinanchor text - Why is allinanchor text and how you should take care of them.

What are supplementary results? Do they affect you? - Everyones, night mare once upon a time.

5 vital SEO stats that you should keep track of - If i were to suggest you 5 SEO metrics that you should constantly keep track of so that you can keep your positions in tact, here are they.

Does Google page rank affect your rankings? - Google page rank is often given more importance than what it actually deserves. Read this article to study the facts.

Importance of incoming links - Why is an incoming link important and how they will help you rank high.

Keyword usage in site content - facts and myths - How should you use keywords in your site content. Do’s and dont’s.

How to SEO on an Ajax-ified site? - When your site is AJAX-ful SEO becomes tough, but here’s how you can effectively harness the power of AJAX as well as SEO together.

How image ALT tags helps you to rank high - Why should you use image ALT tags, where you should use and how?

Flash and SEO - moving together the web2.0 times - How to optimize pages in flash.

Creating SE friendly post titles - What is the importance of titles, how should you write titles to get the edge over other blogger who has the same content.

How to get indexed by Google in 48 hours - Getting indexed on Google is not easy, but here’s a tip that will ensure you indexing in 48 hours or less.

Selecting keywords for SEO - What are keywords and what keywords should you select for your blog?

SEO friendly layout - Ensuring a SEO friednly layout will help you rank high on search engines automatically. See what factors makes your blog SEO friendly.

With the advent of Wordpress and other arrays of blogging softwares, poor old forums have lost their charm. 3 years earlier, PhpBB was the most used software in forums, almost every webmaster had a forum about something. It was an instant hit since it’s launch because of it’s folksonomical nature, but in a more un refined way as compared to the latest softwares.

One major reason why a forum failed is because of it’s non SEO friendly nature.

• Forums did not have SEO friendly urls
• They did not allow bots to crawl the inner pages
• They had SEO un friendly titles
• Forums in general did not look at SE’s with importance at all, so they did not leave any room for tweaks as well.

With all these problems in front of us, let’s see how we can make the forums (PhpBB mainly) SEO friendly?

• Optimizing the page titles
  Page titles are a crucial factor for search engine optimization. Crawlers pick up the titles from every page and it’s important to give maximum information in this area in a non-spammy way. Here’s how you do it by some quick edits.

  - Edit file ‘templates/subSilver(or your template)/overall_header.tpl’

  Replace -

<title>{SITENAME} :: {PAGE_TITLE}</title>

with

<title>{PAGE_TITLE}</title>

or

<title>{PAGE_TITLE} :: {SITENAME}</title>

Edit Viewtopic.PHP

Replace -

$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title;  with
$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title;

• Tweaking the robots.txt file to allow better Search Engine indexing.
  Robots.txt can be used to control what pages is available to search engine robots and what pages are not. Generally on PhpBB, there are lot of sub directories that are allowed to crawl by default. But actually this is not required. We only need to allow certain folders and files to be crawled - so that only the necessary information is available to the crawler.

  Including the below code in to your robots.txt will disallow all the unwanted folders from being crawled by search engines.
  This way only the necessary information (those in the posts) are available for crawlers and the junk is filtered out.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /db/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /privmsg.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /search.php 
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /common.php
Disallow: /config.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /viewonline.php
Disallow: /groupcp.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /memberlist.php
Disallow: /modcp.php
Disallow: /posting.php

• Plugins to help create sitemaps for PhpBB
  Here are some cool plugins/mods for PhpBB that will help you create SEO friendly urls and even sitemaps that will help you get more pages indexed on Google. Here goes -

1. Google, MSN and Yahoo sitemap generator mod for PhpBB - This mod will create a Google SitemapIndex and auto generated Google Sitemaps for phpBB
2. Google Puller - This hack creates pages with 500 links to posts on your community. The words are taken from actual posts on your community (from the search_word table) and they link to the post that contains that word.
   The aim of the hack is to help search engines like Google or MSN to index your pages.

Part 2 of this post will follow with more methods on how to optimize your forum software for more search engines.

Photo courtesy FotoRita

• Google introduces new robots.txt feature where robots.txt analysis tool is able to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls better than before.
• Track where an user clicks on your webpage - WP plugin review by Daniel, Dailyblogtips.com
• How to stop people from stealing content on your blog - Kumiko’s tip to bloggers.
• 7 tips to blogging beginners - By Nirmal TV
• Search uploaded imags in the WP admin panel - “How to” article by Shankar Ganesh
• Three Wp security tips - By Arpit Jacob
• 10 ways to increase traffic - By Sizzledcore, pretty interesting one.