October 21, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under Blogging, Online - written by Elliot Gibson
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BlogRush was only just released on the 15th of September and already its creating quite a stir amoung the blogging community. Basically BlogRush is a widget that you can add to your blog and have your posts automatically promoted on related blogs across the internet. A more detailed explanation is on the BlogRush website, there is also a video on it which helps make things easier to understand. For those who would prefer to read, here’s how BlogRush works:
How Does It Work?
Firstly, you sign up for a free BlogRush account then register your blog by submitting its blog feed and picking a category. Then you put the BlogRush widget on your blog then another 5 links to other topic related blogs will show up in the widget itself.
Earn 1 link, whenever a page loads on your blog: this means that that post will be shown once on other blogs with the widget that you referred to. For example if your blog generates 70 page views, the latest post in your blog will be shown 70 in the widgets of other blogs.
Then you should refer others to sign up and install the widget on their blogs. Which ever number of page views your referee gets will be added to the number of times your blog will be shown on other blog widgets on other blogs. For example, Elliot signs up under your widgets referral link and Elliot’s website has 700 page views. What this means is that your own blog will be shown 700 time across on any blog in your category that has the widget installed. In addition to the number of views you are already getting for having the widget displayed on your blog. And this goes on for 10 referral levels!
This all can literally add up to thousands of links back to your blog. I think this could be a very useful widget in getting a decent amount traffic to your website, then hopefully more subscribers! However you should not be too optimistic about the traffic. It’s still always worth playing around for a while just to test and monitor the results. It’s probably one widget that every blog owner should try out.
October 4, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under Blogging, Books, Reviews - written by Elliot Gibson
Like a lot of “Dummies Books”, this book is indeed comprehensive. It’s a detailed introduction to blogging for a noobie to your typical active blogger wanting to learn more.
This book was written in 2008, so its reasonably current. However I think this is one of those Dummies Books the publishers need to update annually. Readers should always look for the latest possible edition of blogging books, as popular technology changes so often. RSS, comment spam, social networks and pod casting are all reviewed in the book as well.
Two of the larger chapters in this book offer some of the main points for business blogging and advertising. This book does not however offer a “get rich quick scheme” but it does offer enough basics to get started with affiliates, Adsense, TextLink Ads, Adbright and so on. Many screen pictures and sidebars explain complex concepts clearly.
I would recommend this book for noobs all the way through to novice bloggers. Intermediate level bloggers looking to brush up on the basics would probably enjoy adding this as a good reference on the bookshelf. Advanced bloggers wont find much here, though that’s to be expected its a Dummies Book after all!
This is probably the best blogging book targeted at beginners, this one indeed offers the most bang for your buck and really does do a nice job in holding your hand along the way.
We all know SEO is a big thing in this growing technological world. Combining Wordpress and SEO techniques for your blog will really yield a large traffic through search engines.
For those of you who don’t know what SEOÂ is, it is short form for Search Engine Optimization. According to Wikipedia, it is “Search engine optimization (SEO also search optimization) is the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic search listing and thus increasing the volume of traffic from search engines.”
1. SEO Title Tag allows you to decouple post titles from title tagsone and this is helpful in SEO. This plugins lets you define a custom title tag for each of your posts. Title tags are very important in SEO. Normally the post titles are used as title tags by Wordpress but this can really affect your blog SEO.
2. Optimal Title is another SEO plugin that performs similar to SEO Title Tag plugin, it can also perform the job of Optimal Title. It will let you optimize your Wordpress post/page titles for better SEO visibility.
3. All in One SEO Pack is exactly what the title says. This plugin has claimed a lot of popularity in such a short time period. The specialty of this plugin is that it does not concentrate on only one blog SEO factor rather takes care of all of them at once. It…
Generates META tag
Optimizes your Titles
Avoids indexing of duplicate content
4. Permalink Redirect is a SEO plugin saves your blog from getting a duplicate content penalty by major search engines. The plugin makes sure that all of your blog posts and pages are associated respectively to only URL and in case of otherwise query it will reply with a 301 redirect. This will help search engines bots to understand whether the URL ends with a trailing slash or even without it, in both cases the URL is the same and so is the content. For example look at the URLs below:
http://www.teckitech.com/advertise/
http://www.teckitech.com/advertise
These URLs will trigger a duplicate content penalty for your blog if you do not use this plugin.
5. SEO Wordpress is another SEO plugin that helps you save your blog from triggering a duplicate content alert just like Permalink Redirect plugin except that it uses a custom robots.txt file to handle the search engine spiders.
6. Permalink Validtor is the twin brother of the Permalink Redirect plugin but it has been specially coded for those wordpress blogs that are hosted on IIS (Internet Information Services). This plugin validates your permalinks and checks if a certain permalink really redirects to the post that has been requested. It will do these following SEO tasks for you
Adds trailing back-slash if missing
Adds or removes www prefix according to your permalink structure
Forces a correct 404 page instead of showing an empty search result when using an invalid URL
Fixes pagination for WP on IIS
7. WWW Redirect allows users to have more control over the URI in which their users access their blog. www or no-www have been issues of great concern for SEO analysts and it has been recommended that you should either give all your URLs a www or no-www prefix. If you allow your visitors and search engine spiders and bots to access your blog through both www or no-www this can potentially result in a negative search engine optimization and can even conflict with your blog pagerank.
8. Ultimate Tag Warrior is probably the oldest and the most finest multi-features SEO plugin ever built for Wordpress. This plugin will do everything from letting you add META keywords in your blog posts to adding Technorati tags.
9. Head META description is another one of my favorite SEO plugins that I use in collaboration with Ultimate Tag Warrior on this blog. META tags are very important through SEO point of view and the META Description tag is basically used by search engine spiders to show little text snippets for your posts/pages on big search engines.
10. Another Wordpress Meta Plugin is yet another SEO plugin that can do the job of both UTW and Head Meta Description alone by itself. It focuses on the META tags because of their high importance in search engine optimizations and basically allows you to add META keywords and META descriptions to your posts and pages. The best thing about this plugin is that it is backward-compatible with All-in-One-SEO-Pack.
11. Google XML Sitemaps is the mother of all SEO plugins and I can’t imagine a single blog that is not currently using this plugin. The plugin creates valid XML sitemaps of your blog on the fly which you can submit to Google using the Google Webmaster service for faster and better indexing. This plugin ensures that your blog is indexed in Google search results so you can apply your best SEO techniques to get maximum traffic.
12. Search Meter is a plugin that helps you in doing better search engine optimization for your blog indirectly. Through this plugin you can see what people are looking for on your blog and what are the most wanted and hottest searches. Once you find out what people are looking for on your blog you can optimize your blog for those searched keywords so that you get a higher search engine ranking for those searched terms.
13. Nofollow Case by Case helps you remove the nofollow attribute from links in your blog comments. You can also selectively apply nofollow to any comment link you do not like to support or you can even selectively apply nofollow to any comment author link too. The plugin also has a feature that can make all your comment links open in a new window using target=”_blank”. This way you can control the crawling of search engine spiders which are responsible for blog SEO. This plugin should be used with great caution as it can cause negative SEO as well pagerank leaking in some cases.
14. Bunnys Technorati Tags is a simple plugin that is used to display technorati tags in your blog post or pages. Though Ultimate Tag Warrior can do the same job for you but Bunnys Technorati Tags is always a good choice when you want a light and not-heavy plugin unlike UTW. It is always good to display your Technorati tags in posts as this helps you getting extra backlinks from blogs and splogs that copy and republish your content.
15. Simple Tags is yet another plugin used to display Technorati below your blog posts or pages but itis unique and different in the sense that it does not any custom fields. Just by following a simple format you can display technorati tags below your posts and pages even if you are blogging through a remote blogging software like Windows Live Writer etc.
16. Wordpress Tag Clouds is a little-complex plugin that will generate a tag cloud of your blog categories. The tag cloud is generated in accordance to the post concentration of a category i.e. the category with greater posts in it will get a bigger shape and so on. Tag clouds are important through SEO point of view as they tell search engines which links and categories hold more weight and which of them are more important.
17. Permalinks Migration is a SEO-Support Plugin that will not improve your search engine optimization rather it will save it. For example at some point in your blogging career you plan to change the permalink structure of your blog, for better SEO, but are unable to do so because you fear that all of your blog pages and posts indexed by search engines will become invalid and you will lose all your search engine traffic. You don’t need to worry about this anymore as Permalinks Migration plugin will use a 301 redirect to save your SEO and broken links thus you can change the permalinks structure of your blog anytime ever in your life.
18. KB Robots.txt helps you create, manage and maintain a robots.txt file from within your Wordpress admin menu. I have already mentioned that robots.txt is a very important text file that search engine spiders check whenever they enter your blog. This file keeps robots and spiders out of reach of those regions which can trigger negative SEO and duplicate content alerts. This is a very good plugin for blogs which are hosted on a subdomain and for Wordpress MU blogs.
19. Objection Redirection is another SEO support redirection plugin that controls your blog URL redirects. It will let you redirect your old or broken URLs to new and clean ones. Basically the purpose of this plugin is to control your site redirection without having to touch htaccess file and preserving your search engine optimization.
20. SEO Slugs is a pure SEO tool that will generate search engine optimized and SEO friendly posts slugs for your blog posts by removing the common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ automatically. This plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly and the good thing about it is that i won’t overwrite an existing slug. However you can force a new slug generation by deleting your old one.
21. Wordpress Subdomains is a plugin that will convert all your blog categories to subdomains. This is a very good plugin regarding SEO point of view but very dangerous at the same time as it may or may not work with your hosting provider and is kind of complex. Search engine spiders give more weight and ranking to subdomains than mere URLs so this is a good plugin if you want to improve your search engine rankings.
22. Really Simple Sitemap is a plugin that will generate a very simple sitemap of all your blog posts and pages. Unlike Google XML Sitemap plugin this plugin just lists all your published posts for a user or search engine spider to see and does not create an XML sitemap. This plugin is very useful if you want to stop bots and spiders from indexing your categories, archives and feeds.
23. No Ping-wait is a plugin that does not directly help you in any SEO but it can be referred as a long-term and indirect SEO-supporting tool. This plugin will prevent the delay that is caused while publishing your blog post when you are pinging a huge amount of services by making the pinging-action passive. Pinging a huge amount of services gives your blog a better search engine visibility and buzz. You should use this plugin if you are pinging more than 20+ services at once. Here is a list of pinging services that Teckitech uses in accordance to No-Ping wait plugin. You can also ping by using service like Pingomatic.
24. Wp-Supercache - This is really useful in SEO but many people and even qualifies professional forget about this factor. Using this speed up your wordpress blog as it stores a cached version of a page. So when a user requests the page it displays the cached version by not making any heavy server queries every time a user requests the same page. So when a bots vists your site, you site would load much faster making it to index more each visit. I wrote about it on one of my post so feel free to read it as well over here.
25. KB Linker - KB Linker will link phrases you specify to sites you specify. For example, you could make it so that whenever “Wordpress” occurs in a post it is automatically linked to wordpress.org. All you do is enter keyword->URL pairs into the Options->KB Linker page in your admin screen.
These are only some plugins that we found were useful but if you want all kinds of plugins that would influence your SEO then you should visit this search page over here!
Major part of this above section has been reproduced from Sizlopedia’s post on Wordpress SEO Plugins
Our friend Mani Karthik has done a great job listing some of the free SEO optimized themes for wordpress which can be modified according to your site needs. Not only do these theme help you in SEO but ease the process for other plugin to work effectively on your blog. You can view his post over here.
Excerpt “Your websites theme is very important to its success. When your site is indexed by search engines, they actually review your sites theme as well as other content. The theme must be carefully planned. Here are some tips for developing a proper web site theme that will make search engines happy as well…”
Resources Google and SEO Friendly Page Titles
SEOBook has got this great video that breifly illustrates key tips and briefly explained tips.
Google shows the first 60 to 70 characters in the search results. Make sure your important keywords occur early in the page title for scan-ability. If your title goes beyond 70 characters Google may cut off the title before 69 characters and display … at the end of your page title.
Rather than making your page title just the keyword and/or starting your page title with the keyword, sometimes it helps to add in a descriptive modifier before your core keyword. This helps ensure your page is less likely to get filtered out of the search results (and thus makes your rankings more stable) while helping you rank for additional terms.
Page titles are used to draw in clicks from search results amongst many anonymous competing offers, thus they present an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition and qualify prospects to your offer.
Good titles evoke an emotional response, ask a question, or promise something (that the landing page fulfills).
Since the page title is one of the few elements search engines can show searchers before sending them to your site, they place significant weight on the words in the page title. In addition, some people link to pages using their official page title as the link anchor text.
Overlapping modifiers in a reasonable and readable way allows you improve your relevancy scores for an array of keywords, but they still need to read well. Rather than loading up page titles with a keyword list it is better to write a clear compelling offer that contains your keywords and describes your services.
Qualifying the wrong prospective clients with a bad offer will lead to a low conversion rate, or wasting time servicing non-clients. For example, if you sell something that is high end you wouldn’t necessarily want to rank for your keyword with modifiers like cheap and discount, as servicing those people will waste your time.
Page titles should be differentiated from page to page on your site. Unless limited by the size and scope of your site, it is best not to have all your page titles follow the exact same formula across your site. You also should not use the same keyword at or near the start of every page title.
The format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be (at least slightly) different than the words in your meta description and on page headers.
If you have a strong brand you may want to place it at the end of your page title. If you have one of the leading trusted Internet brands (Amazon, eBay, etc.) then it might make sense to place your brand at the start of the page title. In most cases the page title should still be more focused on the page copy and searcher’s intent than on your brand.
If you blog or are creating linkbait make sure you try to create headlines that draw clicks by using magnetic headline principals.
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.
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.
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.
If you haven’t submitted your site to search engines yet, you may want to add to Google or use Submit Express to submit your URL to major search engines including Google.
You might also want to see this great post which talk about other aspects including some which are mentioned here. The post is from Yoast about SEO which you can read over here.
Please share your thoughts, SEO tips, plugins or optimizations you might know with our readers.
