Underrated.co.uk – Search Engine Optimisation

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging applications available, and better still it’s free. There are a variety of themes and widgets available to provide both impressive visuals functionality and appeal to your blog. No doubt many of the blogs you view on a daily basis use wordpress, so that give you at least some idea of how powerful and seful the software is.

Many bloggers post daily and accumulate hundreds if not thousands of pages of unique of content. This being the case it makes sense ensure that SEO techniques take centre stage. Wordpress is by default pretty well optimised for search engines like google but you can take further steps to ensure that you get the most out of efforts:

Plugins

All in One SEO Pack - This plugin automatically optimises page titles for search engines and also generates META tags. It’s possible to override the auto title and META tags should you need to do so. A real time saver and great SEO.

Internal Link Building v2 – An incredibly handy little plugin which allows you to assign keywords to given URLS in the admin panel. This allows you to give users the opportunity to click through to various article of relevance. More importantly though, as set keywords over various blog posts link through to the same page it increases your chance of ranking well in search engines for that keyword (or key phrase).

Tips

Appreciate your users – If someone comments on a blog post, then reply to them. Building visitor rust is a core component of operating a successful blog. Perhaps consider thanking people after they leave their first comment. This can be achieved through use of the comment redirect plugin.

Image Optimisation – Guve consideration to how you name image files and also add appropriate ‘alt’ text to the images. There are programs to add the page title as the alt tag for each message, but I would advise you to be more specific than that in your approach. Done correcty and this can defeinitely bring extra traffic your way.

Permalink Options – By default posts will contain an ugly post id featuring equals signs and question marks. This certainly doesn’t help you with you SEO efforts. Instead you should login and go to ‘Settings > Permalinks’  and under ‘common settings’ select ‘Custom Structure. In this box enter /%postname%/. This will result in the URL being based on the post title, which for search engine optimisation purposes is certainly preferable. 

I hope these tips are of use to you. Feel free to add any of your own to the comments section.

So you’ve created a killer site, but nobody knows about it. Not an ideal situation I’m sure you’ll agree. Search engines such as google give extra weight to sites and pages that have been indexed for a while, and you’re bound to be sandboxed initially, so do not hesitate in getting your site indexed. There are a number of ways to go about getting indexed:

1) Google Submit

Add your site URL to google submit and it will be crawled at some point in the near future. There is no set time period so it could be week, but “better late than never”.

2) Submit Articles

Sites like recommend us alllow you to submit useful articles from your site. This is a good way of getting your content indexed by major search engines. It also may gain you a few backlinks if your article is in any way insightful or interesting.

3) Webmaster Forums

A number of forums apply “nofollow” code to all user posted links. This essentially means that google will not follow the URL you post and as a result it will not count as a backlink. Some forums however do not add “nofollow”. A few such examples in the blogging/webmaster/markatting field are listed below:

Digital Point – The number one in the webmaster forum world

Blogger Talk – A great forum resource for bloggers

Warrior Forum – A wealth of marketting information

A note of caution: These locations are not there for you to spam. If you do so you will likely be banned. Be helpful, be positive, share knowledge and stay on topic.  This way you’ll develop a good reputation and possibly again some useful tips yourself.  

4) Blog Directories

If you run a blog there are plenty of blog directories for you to submit your site to. Blog catalog is a good place to start.       

5) Optimise robots.txt file

Optimising the robots file will ensure which robots you allow to crawl your site, an which directories if any you do not want to be indexed. I would advise that you create a robots.txt file wih the following code (unless you have special requirements):

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

and place it within your top level directory. This will ensure that all spiders are able to crawl your site without issue. Robots can also be used wihin site meta tags on individual pages

6) Other

StumbleUpon presents websites of interest to surfers based on their preferences. Joining this site and plugging a page or two of relevant content is bound to grab you a few backlinks.

 Important

In spreading the word about your site, the quality of your content be in essense be tested. If you’re writing boring articles, or have dead links, then it’s unlikely that you’ll experience much growth as a result of your prmotional efforts. Do not use stolen or duplicate content as google will recognise this and may penalise your site.

google trends chart

terms to optimise for. When comparing terms such as “funny stuff”, “funny clips” and “funny videos” it’s possible to see whichs ones are most searched for, and as importantly how popular or unpopular they are becoming.

To further refine a SEO strategy, why not browse through the first 10 or 20 results in google for these terms and try to ascertain the general quality and popularity of these sites. This can be done by checking the page rank, number of backlinks and alexa rating of the site in question. You can also use the google trends for websites to gauge site popularity. If one groups of results for a keyword phrase looks particulalrly weak that they may well be a good angle of attack.