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.

Tags: Blogs, cms, link building, seo, wordpress

Website promotion is not only about what you do, but also what you do not do. Check out the below list for ten things to avoid when promoting your website:

1) Do not launch mirror websites

A mirror site is an exact copy of your site at a different address. If you launch a mirror version of your site search engines may well blacklist or penalise your the site. This will seriously harm your search engine positioning, so beware. The same problem can occasionally come about due to search engines indexing both the “yoursite.com” and “www . yoursite . com” versions of a site. This can be remedied by setting up a   permanent (301) redirect and also by setting a preferred domain in the google webmaster tools area.

2) Avoid using flash, frames, java on your website 

Extensive use of any of these (or even minor use in the case of a site navigation) can can hamper your search engine optimisation efforts. Using frames most likely will result in your site not being correctly indexed and you’ll be right back at the web design drawing board. That’s pretty much why frames are yesterdays news now. Search engines also have problems indexing flash and java, so I would be inclinded to steer clear of those too.

3) Optimise your entire site, NOT just your homepage

Many site owners begin and end their optimisation efforts on their homepage. This is due to their belief that the index page is the gateway to their website. If have have 100 pages of unique content though, why limit your optimisation efforts to one page – it’s insanity. All pages should have a unique title for starters. There would be nothing worst than an interesting article being linked to numerous times, only for it to appear as something non descript or incorrect in search engine rankings. 

4) Steer Clear of Keyword Calamities

It may be tempting to ue a whole host of irrelevant (to the content) keywords on a page and/or metatags in order to achieve high rankings for a certain term. This will very likely fail though, as google, yahoo and co are able to categorise the content and theme of your site, and any deviation from that is recognised. You could even be blacklisted. The same applies to keyword stuffing and the like. Honestly is the best policy. 

5) Avoid spamming

If you have a new site, it’s understandable that you want the world to see it. Spamming forums, blog comment sections, directories, newsletter lists and so on isn’t the way to go though. All it can bring you is a bad reputation. Many services offer to submit your site to hundreds of directories, when in reality if they do this with your site, they do it with thousands of others too. That means that your site will effectively appear in hundreds of link dumps that are next to worthless to search engines and may even count as a negative due to their spammy nature. The scattergun approach doesn’t wok.

6) Do not hound webmasters for link exchanges

Similiar to the above point. If your site is young, do not spend hour after hour emailing webmasters with much more popular sites than yours. Even if they are in the same niche it’s not a useful activity. Instead wait until you have build up a following and have had some successes. In that position you’ll be in a much better position to be accepted for a link exchange.

7) Achieve a balance between content and promotion / optimisation

Website promotion and SEO is an ongoing task. Popularity is not something that can be achieved overnight, do not forget that it goes hand in hand with content though. It’s very easy to get stuck in an optimisation mindset where content and thinking about interesting ideas for articles takes a backseat. In reality this IS central to promotion though. If you have an amusing or unqiue idea for an article this can drive your promotional efforts as it may well have a viral effect. Content is king.

8)  Don’t pay for what you can get for free

Many inexperieced webmasters get suckered into paying big bucks for “we sumbit your website to 20 billion directories” type offers. As stated earlier these are a bad idea. Instead you should look for niche directories that actually relate to the content of your site. Exchange links with similiar sized sites. Post occasionally to digg and such sites. Let your site grow naturally.

9) Do not rush to submit your site

If your site contains dead links of incomplete content, it’s not a great first impression to leave for visitors. Should you submit such a site to a editor reviewed website directory like dmoz, it will almost certainly be rejected for inclusion.

10)  Stop viewing promotion as a short term activity

Promoting a website is an ongoing activity, not something you dip into for a week or two in order to get things going. You have competition and they will always be looking for ways to gain an edge. If you take your foot on the gas, you will be overtaken.

Tags: blacklisted, content, directories, link exchanges, spamming

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.

Tags: articles, Blogs, directories, forums, google, sandboxed