Photo courtesy fotoluvr

Seems like Matt’s White Hat SEO tips presentation is a goldmine. Every time you read through, you get more insights. Here is a new one from Matt’s presentation.

- Use keywords in your categories.

Matt thinks that using your targeted keywords in your category names will benefit your more. That’s indeed a great idea, why didn’t anyone think about it earlier?

I think it’s high time we checked our category names. How many categories do you have? How many of them makes sense and how many doesn’t?

I have a few like - Search Engine Optimization tips, Wordpress tips etc. And they are indeed my targeted keywords. What if i had something like - Misc? or Unrelated? or General ? Problem - right?

Matt’s tip says the same. Try to make your categories as natural as possible embedded with the targeted keywords. If you have one that makes no sense to the crawlers, change them today.

Example: -
“Misc” can be changed to “Non SEO tips”
“Blogging” can be changed to “Blogging Tips”
“Wordpress” can be changed to “Wordpress tweaks/tips”

The idea is to utilize your real estate and convert it to steroid filled keywords. Categories are one of the most repeated element in any page of your blog. They appear in ever page, and the click ability ration is high for them. As per Matt’s idea, making good use of keywords in categories will help Google to understand what your site is about. Other areas where Google looks into for getting idea about your site is your description tag and meta tag (to name a few). I think for wordpress users the category list is one good resource to feed the crawlers.

Impact of changing Category names
Let’s see what would happen if we change the category names overnight?

- Broken links if you are using the permalink in %category%/%posts% format.
If you have custom permalinks, with the above format, then get ready for dealing with some broken links. So you may not want to change the category names in this case.

- New sitemap
When the category names change, get a new sitemap in place for there is a significant change in the site structure and content.

- Meta tags
It will be a good idea to change your keywords in the Meta tags to match that of the categories, so that the keyword density for the particular keyword increases in the code. A good idea will be to just add the new category names to the Meta keywords.

Of course, the benefits of using keywords as metatags are many. In order to get the maximum advantage, my opinion is to use the custom permalinks to  - %category%posts  from %date%posts The most significant benefit of this is the SERP’s advantage. Search Engines would catch your keyword in the url, if not anything else.

Ex:- If earlier your URL was something like - dailyseoblog.com/date/postname, it would be dailyseoblog.com/keyword(category)/posts

So along with your keyword research for articles, save some keywords for the categories too. And change your custom permalinks to %category% format from %date% format. Thanks Matt.

Sitemaps are of two types - one for human eyes and the other for crawlers and search engines. We’ve already discussed how to create a sitemap for search engines.Now, let’s create a sitemap page in HTML for user’s visual navigation.

Sitemaps are an essential part of a blog since it helps people to get an overview on what’s your blog content without having to spend time on pages.It makes it easy for them to select what’s appropriate for them.

Here’s a cool tool - Sitemap Pro. It helps you to create a HTML sitemap with the following options.

- CSS Styled HTML page.
Either you can link the document to a local style file or an online location.The resulting HTML sitemap will be in the selected CSS styled format.

- Filenames
You can select if every link to a page should also show it’s filename or not.

- Snippets of content
You can also select if each title should show the first few lines of post from the page.

- Column structure
The sitemap can be generated in two, three column format. See examples here.

- Sort in alphabetical order
With this option, when the sitemap is generated, irrespective of your post timings, all the contents will be sorted in any fashion you require(A-Z,1-0 etc)

The tool is available for evaluation as well. I think every blog should have a HTML sitemap, as it’s important to give the user’s an option to select what they want to read.It’s easy to skim through the contents on a sitemap and select what you just need.

After running the program, all you need to do is upload the html file to your server and link it on the navigation links.

Now, upload your images to Imageshack, and post it directly to your blog through the Wordpress dashboard, while writing a post.

He did it first with the Google Sitemap plugin. Arne has brought out another plugin for wordpress that will enable you to upload the images to imageshack instead of your host. It’s an easy to use plugin currently supported by Wordpress 2.1

He says -

This plugin allows you to upload images from your WordPress post screen and to insert them with the thumbnail into your post with a few clicks.

Download the plugin here

Advantages
- Easy to use.
- Save on server space and bandwidth.
Dis Advantages
- Imageshack may be banned in some countries - so your blog images may not show up.
- Since imageshack does not provide user account(like picasa or Flickr), if you don’t save the urls, the image cannot be traced if lost.

But it is a handy plugin for bloggers who post more images in their posts. Using images extensively will eat up your bandwidth and server space.This one’s a redeemer.

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.

Wordpress is easy to configure - but doing some cool little tweaks(which are also easy) can give you outstanding results - be it traffic or Search Engine ranks that you are looking for. here’s a compilation of the best SEO tweaks for Wordpress.

1. Custom permalinks - Undoubtedly the best one suggested by SEO’s. This tweak requires you to change the default page title from (www.yourdomaincom/?p=5) to a much SEO and user friendly www.yourdomainname.com/category/page title.
   This can be done by following the two below steps.
   1. Goto Options > Permalinks
   2. Change the default setting to custom with the following code - /%category%/%postname%/
2. Custom Page Title
   Page titles in Wordpress are by default like this - Blog Name - Post title
   A better title would be Post Title - Blog name, as the important keywords are in the post title.Search Engines love it so make the change today.
3. Make your titles links
   If your theme doesn’t have links on your article titles, make the change today. Convert them to links so that search engines can detect them easily and humans as well(if they are planning to use the link). Without the link, it’s impossible(almost) to link to that post right?
   This tweak simple incorporates the permanent link to your post headings.
   In your Main Index Template and Page Template, find the code for the post tiltle, it would look like this - without the square brackets but these > <.
   

   [h2][?php the_title(); ?][/h2]

   Now, replace it with

   [h2][a href=”[?php the_permalink() ?]” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to [?php the_title(); ?]“][?php the_title(); ?][/a][/h2]

   (replace teh square brackets with these><)

4. Use a Google Sitemap generator plugin for wordpress
   There are quite a few plugins available, but i think this one by Dagon Design is the best.
   This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.Hmm, that’s quite something right?
5. Add custom Meta tags to different pages on your blog.
   You are right, there is a default entry by which you can give a meta tag for the entire site. But this plugin helps you to have more than one meta tag for each page like the About page or the Contacts page. The result? When your site appears on the SERPS, the description for each page(Contact, About, and other pages if any) will be unique and this will attract people to click on your site. Sounds cool? It is indeed.
   

These are the Top 5 Wordpress tweaks that will give you that extra edge over normal wordpress non-SEO’d blogs. If all these tricks are combined with the ones that I’ve mentioned recently, i assure you’ll be a hot pick for the search engines!

Back to some basics today.

For all novices out there - Do you know if your site is indexed on Google?

Meaning - Is your site recognized by Google? Or Do your site appear on Google search results?

Not sure? Okay goto www.google.com/yahoo.com/msn and search for site:www.yourdomain.com

If it gives a result like - “Site not found”, then it means that your site is not in the Google index.
If it is there in the Google site index, then the search would give you pages from your site only.

If it shows some results as “Supplemental index” - read this article on how to deal with supplemental results.

If your site is not indexed, here’s what you should do.

1- Get your site indexed to google by submitting to Google.(using http://www.google.com/addurl.htm)
2 - Get someone with a decent PR and reputation at Google(Not adult/spammy sites) link to you.

I’d recommend option2 rather than 1 for more than one reason.

- Google takes very long time to get indexed by this method.
- There is no guarantee.
- You can’t rely on this method.

Method 1 is the best way to get indexed on Google, and I’ve talked about it here earlier.

If you think the number of pages on Google is not the actual number of pages you have on your site/blog, then you may want to consider submitting a sitemap to Google using this method.

Today, let’s see more about sitemaps. Every webmaster must have a sitemap ready for his site and submit it to google in order to get all the pages listed on Google.Sitemaps are of two types, as you know the HTML sitemap you use to navigate a site and second the sitemap used to help crawlers crawl the pages more effectively.

Why are they necessary?

Sitemaps are not necessary.(Yep i said that) Even if you don’t have sitemaps the crawlers will crawl your pages and find the content. But, it is like letting them crawl in a dark room. What if you had a well lit room with all navigation and helpers around which will take them to each room? It will be more effective right? Sitemaps serve this purpose.

It has the site structure ready giving indication to the crawlers as to which are the folders/files that are important, which are not, which are the folders/files that are to be visited frequently, and which are the ones to be visited only once. This helps the crawlers to undersand your site more effectively.

Now, how to build a sitemap for blogger?

It’s very simple in Blogger. It only requires you to go to the Google Webmaster Central and ass your site feed and the sitemap is automatically created. You can get detail instruction on this here.Make sure that you submit your full feed and not partial one.

Which is the best sitemap generator program around?
There are lot of free online and downloadable sitemap generators.
Here’s a simplified listing of what is best.

1- Python Scipt - This is the most difficult one to install. But if you are familiar with python, then this is the best one around.It’s automated and requires no additional support.I don’t recommend it for a beginner.Requires technical knowledge.

2 - Online sitemaps - This is best for small websites. It’s easy, simple and online.Just go to this site and submit your url.Fill in some basic details like time and priority settings for the files and click go!The whole sitemap will be generated online.You will get both ROR file and the Google sitemap XML file.If you are interested only in Google, use the XML sitemap.The format is according to Google sitemap protocol and is faultless.
Best choice for beginners and small websites of less than 500 pages.

3 - Gsite Crawler - This is a downloadable application. If your website is a bit large and you have time to tweak some settings and is serious about sitemap, then i would recommend this guy for you.
It requires you to give the website url, then select the types of files to be scanned from it, priority settings are automatically detected, and you can create bot Google sitemap and Yahoo url.
It has report generation as well that will give you an idea of how many urls were crawled and broken links etc.This is very useful while handling large sites.

How to make sitemap for large sites?

If you have really large websites for instance a one million page one, then it’s really going to be tough creating a sitemap. Practically this is possible with the Python script but if you are not okay with the technical stuff then you got to depend on sitemap generator programs.(If you don’t have a really large website the follwing piece of information may not help you.)

Step 1 - Download a free sitemap generator program like Gsite crawler.
Step 2 - Use it to crawl each folder of your website as separate projects.Make sure that you create a new database each time a new project is opened.
Step 3 - Now you have separate sitemaps for each folder.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder1 has a sitemap called folder1.xml and yourdomain.com/folder2 has a sitemap called folder2.xml
Step 4 - Download this simple index generator program.
Step 5 - Copy paste all the folders (containing the sitemaps) from thh projects folder of Gsite crawler(C:program files…) and put it into one single folder.
Step 6 - Run the index generator program against this parent folder.
Step 7 - Now a sitemap index would be created with links to all the child sitemaps but one problem, since in Gsite Crawlers projects folder(C:Program Files) each crawled folder will be named with underscore replacing the forward slash.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder will be named as yourdomain.com_folder
Therefore the sitemap index produced will have the links too this way.
Step 8 - Use notepad/wordpad to open the sitemap index file. Find and replace all the underscores with forward slash.
Step 9 - Upload the child sitemaps in the respective folders online.
Ex: - yourdomain.com/folder1..folder2 etc.
Step 10 - Upload the sitemap index file to the root folder and submit it to google.

Bingo! There you go you have now created a sitemap index and child sitemaps for a large website. Now submit it trough the webmaster central window and keep waiting!

Google Sitemaps is an excellent way to submit your site to Google. If you are not sure of what a site map is -

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

See here to see what are the data stored in a sitemap and why.
Google provides the option to tell it through the robots.txt file asto where the sitemap file is located.

Just add this into the robots.txt file with the link to your sitemap file -

Sitemap:http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

You can submit sitemaps(in xml format) in the Google Webmaster’s Tools but in case you are worried how to make one, here’s a quicky!

Goto XML-Sitemaps and submit your site url, give in the settings(updated hourly,monthly etc) and allow it to make a sitemap. It may take some time but it’ll also show how many files are processed and how many are yet to. A maximum of 500 files will be taken care of - not more(T’was free remember?)

You can get the sitemap done in ROR Format,Text,Compressed XML Format,Uncompressed XML format, or even HTML format(for site use).