Apr
01
Filed Under (Wordpress SEO) by Mani Karthik on 01-04-2008

Why should you save bandwidth? You’ve got enough of it haven’t you?
You should ask that question to someone who gets lot of traffic, especially from Digg/ SU etc. They’d immediately gulp down anything you suggest to save the bandwidth.

Recently, there have been server breakdowns with many bloggers because of the social media outburst. Many of them did nothing wrong but some ardent reader of their’s picked up one of the stories and submitted to Digg. The story went viral and made it to the top of the Digg’s most dugg pages. Unfortunately the blogger was running on a shared hosting platform and the server could not stand the immediate traffic burst that was created from Digg making it to go crash. The site went offline soon after the story was popular resulting in some bad reputation too.

Now this would happen only if you make it to the top of Digg, anyways it makes sense to save some bandwidth with some common, unharming tips right?
One of the things that eat up your bandwidth is images - when you upload images in wordpress it goes to the default directory - wp-admin/uploads
Now, when ever a story is accessed with the picture on it, file is being accessed and it doubles your bandwidth usage.

What you can do in this case is upload the images to flickr or any other image upload utility so that the image gets accessed from there and not your server.

Now, I know how hard it is to upload image to flickr while you are writing a post, it takes another 10 minutes of your time (unless you are using the upload function from the Flock browser).

So here is a wordpress plugin that will help you upload images to flickr just the way you do it on wordpress. Yes, while you are writing the post with no extra time lost.
Download the plugin here.

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Mar
31

Ever had problems finding what your blogs ranks are on the search engines for particular keywords?
Like for instance, if you wanted to check where your blog ranked on Google for the keyword “make money online”, it would be a big task since the keyword itself is very competitive and if you are not problogger or shoemoney, you are probably in the 167th page or worse. So it’s not quite possible to track where your blog is ranking by searching through the Google results right?

seo-rank-checker.jpg

Here is a nice tool that will take care of it. Rank Checker is a plugin for firefox that will take care of this task.
All that you have to do is , install the plugin, restart firefox and given in a keyword + URL combination into the plugin page.

Like for instance if you are finding out where the blog “dailyseoblog.com” is ranking for “wordpress seo blog” then give in these two criteria into the “domain” and “keyword” fields respectively and click go. First you add the combination to the queue and then on clicking the “start” button the engine searches for the results.

You’ll be able to get the search engine rank result for Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN). There is an option to give multiple keywords and also export the results to a CSV file, enabling you to open it in your spreadsheets. Pretty cool eh? However, one minute problem I faced is that it gave me no option to resize he window, it stretched all the way horizontally and wasn’t really maneuverable.

Install the Firefox plugin here
.

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Mar
18
Filed Under (Wordpress SEO) by Mani Karthik on 18-03-2008

Hereafter, I’d be doing a podcast every weekend on selected SEO tips. This is the first of the series where, I’m talking about “Duplicate content issues on Wordpress and how to curb it”. The quality isn’t awesome, but this would be taken care of in the next episodes as I’m getting into the groove slowly. Hope you’d like the episode and forgive the mistakes in it (Aw, this is a tedious job I tell you! ) :D.
After all, it’s the information that matters. So here you go.

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Mar
06
Filed Under (Search Engine Optimization) by Mani Karthik on 06-03-2008

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.


Search Term Position on
Google
how to find number of incoming links 3
tips to send gifts to india 5
optimizing blog tags 3
google crawler headers 1
free seo wordpress themes 4
pagerank website age 9
best seo wordpress themes 1
insert flash to wordpress 9
changing blogger title tags 3
create sitemap on blogger 3
how to get free backlinks 4
seo wordpress theme 3
wordpress tweaks 4
increase subscribers to your blog 1
blogger seo title 1
increase your page rank 6

 

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.

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Mar
05
Filed Under (Wordpress SEO) by Mani Karthik on 05-03-2008

Twitter is gaining on…Chris loves it Darren loves it John TP loves it..so why should you wait? Hop in.

wordpress-twitter-plugins

There are a number of plugins available for twitter today, but out of them honestly only a few makes sense. Here’s a list of the best twitter plugins for wordpress.

  1. Alex Kings plugin or Twitter
    Undisputedly the number one twitter plugin for wordpress.
    What is remarkable about it
    Allows you to post your tweets as a new post each time you tweet, automatically on your blog.
    Great plugin, lot of functions, easy to handle.
  2. Twitter update plugin for Wordpress
    This is probably is the opposite of Alex’s plugin, this one lets you tweet out your latest posts on twitter, while a new article is being published.
    What is remarkable about it
    It takes the burden off your shoulders of self promotion to your followers.
    What could go wrong
    Your followers may not like you “only” self promoting your articles all the time.
  3. Twitter sidebar wordpress widget
    This one is for the ardent twitter fan who does not want to do self promotion but get alerts from people whom he is following while he is busy blogging. It adds a small widget to the sidebar of your wordpress blog that will display all your latest tweets and updates.
    What is remarkable about it
    You could stylize it however you want using CSS and make it not look like a widget at all.
  4. WordTwit Twitter plugin for Wordpress
    Pretty much a straight forward wordpress plugin that will display all your recent twitter tweets from friends on Wordpress.
  5. Eat It - Twitter plugin for Wordpress
    Twitterpress is a simple plugin to update your twitter account automatically whenever you publish a new post from your hosted wordpress blog. It’s not very layman friendly, but would be something geeks would like.
  6. Twitt-too wordpress twitter plugin
    This is a rich twitter plugin that will help you to integrate twitter to wordpress with ease. It allows you to update your twitter account with tweets directly from your blog. The display is cool it even has your avatar shown.
    What is remarkable about it
    It is completely AJAXified, making it a breeze to use it.

Other great Twitter tools - For desktop, iphone, browsers etc.

In case you are a die hard Twitter fan, you might enjoy this collection of Twitter tools.

  • Twitteroo - A desktop application for Windows that helps you to twitter right from your desktop without requiring to vist the twitter website and logging in.
  • Twitbin - A firefox extension that helps you to tweet right from your favorite browser.
  • Facebook Twitter plugin - A twitter plugin for facebook.
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Mar
04

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.

Longscreenshot

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.

screen-top 

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.

screen-logo1  
screen-logo2  

 

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. 

screen-footer

 

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.

(38) Comments    Read More   
Feb
23
Filed Under (Search Engine Optimization) by Mani Karthik on 23-02-2008

Wordpress-SEO-guide

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.

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Feb
11

How often do you twitter? I’m finding myself spending more time on it than ever before. Both of them are easy to handle and cute. Everything about it is so short and sweet, and takes least time to get the best thing done. The best thing implied here is probably a weird thought about a facebook application that I had, or a link to a powerful plugin, or a kickass domain name that just went over my head. We have to admit that on WP, it takes good 15 minutes to do it, while on these cuties, less than 2 minutes? And it’s all so compact and fun!

We all have a liking to tools that are customized and personal right? Some good ones I met recently are these three.

- I like the “Maami” on ibibo, who (reminds me of the Channel V Bai) appears in between and prompts you to fill in your details like address and telephone number. She’s so annoying yet nice with her witty lines. Once she asked me - “You are looking cute in that picture you just uploaded, do you mind giving your telephone number? I promise I won’t call you.” Now I’m sure whoever used that tool enjoyed it. Innovation.

- I also like Tumblr for it’s personalized messages it throws up. When I uploaded a profile pic of mine, it said something along the lines of the ibibo Maami.

- Of course Flickr. Those regional “hello” messages helped me get a name among friends. They thought I traveled to Hawaii and Israel recently.(Shhh!)

For bloggers - There’s this cool plugin that integrates twitter completely with your blog. It’s from Alex King and it’s here(That probably is his 9198423th incoming link.) Another interesting deviation plugin is over here.

Why Twitter and Tumblr?

  • Both are extremely flexible yet powerful at the same time.
  • Ease of use.
  • Has a personalized touch.
  • Support is extremely good.
  • Helps me in SEO (*food for thought)

Technorati Tags: , ,

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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.

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Jan
24
Filed Under (Search Engine Optimization) by Mani Karthik on 24-01-2008

What is a landing page?

When a visitor or a crawler first access your URL, the first page/file that is seen/served to the visitor/crawler is called the landing page. (No, we are not going to talk SEM here at all. In SEM landing page is one where the visitor is first “brought” to.)

Generally, the landing page is often an HTML or a static page in used websites. Earlier when there was no definition of what a landing page was, there were many versions of landing pages. Some websites used animations, some used funnel marketing techniques, some greeted people with funny and interesting welcome messages, some people used disclaimers and some even used redirection pages.

So all of that was used in the olden days. Come web 2.0, Google and the search engine optimization gurus, landing page optimization has gained importance as never before and it has helped the user in one way because many of the landing pages are now standardized.

These days web designers are aware of the importance a landing page and know how it would help them in beating competition on the serps.

Now, there are two types of landing pages. They’re based on your purpose. A marketeer who wants to market his product in a one page funnel system, is talking about a landing page that will help him convert a potential interested person to a client/customer. You might have seen such pages for E-books and other product marketing pages.

In such pages, the intention of the ,marketeer is to make you convince to buy the product asap, driving you to take an action (often that target) through a carefully drafted copy. Well, for this kind of landing pages, you’d need a good copyrighter and some cash. You don’t really need SEO the way other sites do.

So please make clear that we are not talking about one page, funnel system marketing page that gives you the “Ultimate secret what every SEO hides from you” strategy here, but purely SE optimizing your normal landing pages.

How important is a landing page and it’s optimization?

OK, so we have all sorts of CMS’s today. So a landing page optimization would make sense for a static page guy who is trying to market an ebook but how does it help a wordpress or Joomla guy?

Let’s talk about static webpages first.

A landing page is “supposed” to contain more vital information about what the site is/what the product is than any other page on the website.
Scanning a landing page will be the surest way to find out what product you are selling and who you are. Hence, search engines, give a decent weightage to them.

How to design an effective landing page?

Designing a layout that will help the crawler to pick up only the vital information we need it to, is the key in landing page optimization. In static webpages (HTML or other), it is easy to design a layout as we want it since you have all the flexibilities. So what are the things that you should keep in mind.

- First things first.
As a thumbrule, place the most vital information about the product/service in a very recognizeable format in an evident manner on the landing page. This applies for both search engines and humans.
Place them before any thing else in the BODY tag. Let the most important one appear first and others follow.

- Give the most importance to the most important.
Use H1 tags to highlight the main content on the page. Also use STRONG tag to highlight the cream of your content.

- Follow a SEO friendly layout. Place the content to be crawled in the first block and not in the last one.

- Use the space wisely, instead of large image headings you might want to use a much crawlable textual content that describes the product/service.

- Keep a clean and thin code. Use standardized code structure to minimize the erros and invalid entries. Follow a strict code that validates to ensure that the page collects the value factor.

- Use a spider simulator to test simulate the page and make sure that the content is ready for the crawlers in a palatable format.

- Get maximum incoming links to the first landing page with it’s file name (like www.yourname.com/index.html) with the appropriate anchor text you need.

- Maintain a healthy keyword ratio on the landing page.

- Use a nice footer text to make sure you’ve lost nothing.

Having said all this, it is easy for anyone to just overdo things and get the whole thing screwed. So here are somethings that you should take care of.

Things to keep in mind.

Flash / Ajax

Use no flash/ajax on the landing page please. It is only good for the user and not the search engines. If at all you are keen on using such content, make sure you leave room for textual content and let it appear first with more importance than the flash. It can be pushed to a side.

Frames

No frames please. Frames are so old stuff, people have many numerous ways to get over frames but produce the same effect of calling different frames to a single page. So never use frames because they simply dissolve your SEO quotient. If you are keen on frames use a two frame model where the frames are split into two and you should select one over the other for SEO and deply the tactis there. It wouldn’t give you the same result as of using a single page, but yes, it is not very far.

Popups

Many might already know this, as AdSense doesn’t allow it. It has less effect on SEo but yes, on the whole if you look at the quality factor there is a grey shade for using the popup. So keep away from them on the landing apge.

Don’t dump links

OK so you have your homepage, so why don’t I dump all the category pages and other links that I have on the landing page. After all, it can’t escape the users eyes. true - but more than the UA side, too many links on the homepage dissolves your SEO quotient. Keep them toa minimum. Use only the link that will take you to the most important pages on the site. And use the proper anchor text there, let it be keywords combined with categories so that you hit two birds in one shot.

Javascript

Oh! Did i not mention javascript? You knew it anyway! Never use them.(If possible, on the inside pages too.)

How about in Wordpress/ Joomla?

In wordpress, you should do pretty much all the basic SEO that you do, and also take special attention to ward off duplicate content. Ex:- Archives, Featured post etc ;)

Tips and tricks

  • Use a map or street address in the homepage. It will help you to get featured on the SERPS with your location. This is not a guarantee and mostly works only for US clients. But if you have decent traffic and the map/address placed well on the landing page, you’ll get some extra space on the SERPs with your location etc.
  • Use all the H1..H2..H3 tags to categorize your text content into most important(H1)..less important (H2)..etc.
  • Use a three column layout. Enough said. ;)
  • Avoid content duplication.
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