Structure A SEO Blog

July 11, 2008

Keeping blog organized is very important, making navigation smooth for you and for readers. As blog organization I think on building WordPress as silos, what in essence means thematically. Purpose of silos creating is to help Google and other search engines easier to see the site, indexing it in the right way, and eventually bringing more traffic. WordPress categories are helping so much for proper silo building. Besides that, in this article, I will guide you through plugin and pinging organization for WordPress. So, if you’re not sure how properly to build and organize your WordPress weblog, here is a clue:

Blog’s Tagline

Tagline is important, because it shows in search engine results. Besides that, it also displays in the browser’s tag when your website loads.

To set up weblog’s tagline, go to your WordPress admin / Settings / General, and enter the name and tagline for your weblog.

Make sure to include your major keyword, and even better, if you can, put it as a first word of the phrase.

Why Blog Categories Are Important?

Here we are coming to building WordPress in silo way. I have researched and watched several videos, and found this one from seomoz helpful and the easiest to understand. Watch the video and see what I mean.

In short, keep your categories organized:

so your visitors can navigate through your WordPress weblog better and easily can find what they want
in purpose of search engine optimization (silo organized categories help search engine to see properly your site, giving you better SEO rank and eventually send you more traffic),
In silo-ed categories you need deep linking, to link your posts to other posts in the same silo. For example, if your silos (categories) are “SEO” and “WordPress,” then the goal is to have your SEO posts interlinking with one another and your WordPress posts interlinking with one another.

silos thematically blog building | WordPress Tutorial

Manage Categories for your WordPress:

Use paper and pen to design your blog;
Go to your WordPress admin/ Manage/ Categories, and set up your categories and sub-categories. Make sure the keyword for your topic or sub-niche is included in your category name;
Use the “description” box to enter a phrase that will show up when the visitor’s cursor hovers over the category name.

WordPress Plugins

With WordPress you can easily install add-ons called plugins which will bring more functionality to your blog. There are hundreds of them from helping you to optimize for Search Engines to translating blog in other languages, or saving it from spam comments.

Installing and Activating Plugins - Watch my WordPress weblog video tutorials. There you will find how to install and which plugins are important for search engine optimization. The installation is quite similar for all of them, and once you install the first WordPress plugin, you will be confident with configuration of others as well. Further you can browse through WordPress plugins directory.

Internal links

To connect your pages use anchor text. You can check at Wikipedia but in sum anchor text is clickable hyperlink, giving you option to put keywords, and if you are linking from the page that has good page rank, it will boost page rank of the blog post you are linking to, eventually boosting the SEO rank and getting more traffic to that blog post. At seomoz this process has been explained in details.

Additionally to that, I encourage you to check Ian Roger’s post The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works. It will give you an idea how to interact your blog links.

Now, this is very important. I already said that you can watch WordPress Video Tutorials, where you can see configuration of “All in one SEO”, “Google Sitemap” and couple more SEO important plugins. Nevertheless, I want to list 3 more plugins which are for advanced bloggers. What I mean, if you’re new to blogging and website building you can encounter terminology which can be confusing. If it’s your situation, then I suggest you go step by step with video tutorials first, and after that follow instructions for these plugins:

These plugins will give you more control in your blog structure linking. You will be able to determine nofollow for external links and you will have more control for your internal link juice.

You will notice mutual overlapping of some functions, and overlapping with “All in one SEO” and “Google Sitemap”, but it’s important to install and configure all these WordPress plugins, because every of them is bringing something unique. Where convergence is present, just disable that option for one of them (for example “WordPress SEO Master” meta description is overlapping with “All in one SEO” meta description - so I have just disabled this option in “WordPress SEO Master” plugin). It’s not wise just to install these plugins, so read carefully instructions from plugins sites and follow instructions on plugins options page in your WordPress admin.

Update: There is a new version of WordPress SEO Master plugin, which is covering all options from All in one SEO. So, now I see it’s smarter to disable “All in one SEO”, and let “WordPress SEO Master” do whole job.

External links

Use external links to provide relevant resources. If you are using Blogroll to exchange links with other bloggers, then stay in your niche, because Google can „penalize“ you and you can lose SEO traffic if you are linking too much to topics outside of yours. This also count for blog posts, i.e. external link has to be relevant to post topic.

Ping blog

When you publish new post on your WordPress blog, it automatically announces that content to various directories by “pinging” them. Here is the list of services I ping every time with new post:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.kping.com/ping/
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc

There is no need to adjust that every time, it needs to be set only once on your blog and it will be remembered for all next posts. To set up this, in your WordPress admin, just go to Settings/ Writing and scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter the links in the rectangle.

It is important to have pingomatic (or similar services) in the list. I saw many larger lists, but I do not see point if you ping Pingomatic and after separately ping many other services (technorati, weblogs…) which are already pinged with pingomatic. Similar service is kping. I use both (pingomatic and kping) because there are some directories that are not covered on pingomatic.

There’s just one more thing. You will certainly want to install plugin Smart Update Pinger. It will adjust your blog to ping directories only when you’re publishing a new post, not when editing (what will prevent blogging directories to see your pings as spam).

This is end of the 3rd step from How to create a successful blog? Happy silos building and happy blogging!

If you want to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for RSS feed. Thanks for reading.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

What’s A Trackback?

June 8, 2008

In a nutshell it’s a type of linkback. It’s a process for bloggers to send a notification and demand for linkback once they write something in one of their documents that directs to other blogger content. Once a weblog author publishes a post, the other blogger receives a notification, and through moderation process can permit or refuse the trackback. They moderate it just like a regular comment. If they permit it, trackback will show in comment sector of their post, with linkback to the first blogger.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

Optimize Your Images Like a SEO Professional

June 3, 2008

I have decided to switch to revolution theme and will do that next week because this week I will have limited access to the internet. And this excellent WordPress theme is nice intro for my post, because its area is much smaller than xmark theme which I am using in this moment. So, my large images do not fit in the new weblog theme, and I will need to adjust them. I’ve already done that with few of them and will continue with the rest.

The point is that I need to reformat my blog images. And I want them to fit in nice, and I found that general rules (which will not cause problems in any theme) are:

For images, only use .jpg or .gif file formats;

Images on the site should be no larger than 400 x 400 pixels at the most. Even better size would be 200 x 200.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

You Don’t Have to Be A Professional To Monitor Your Market!

May 26, 2008

Whatever your site is about and whatever market you are in, this service is bringing post material to you. Like I stated in the post google web accelerator can speed up mozilla firefox and internet explorer Google is offering so much amazing tools behind the searching the web.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Google | Leave a Comment

Don’t Allow This Stupid Mistake To Lose Your Page Rank

May 22, 2008

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I discovered how your website can play “ugly” game with you, along with search engine. These all addresses search engines are seeing like a different URLs, no matter they open the same page:

http://example.com
http://example.com/
http://example.com/index.html
http://www. example.com
http://www. example.com/
http://www. example.com/index.htm

If you or other people are linking to your Internet site using a diversity from these similar URL’s, you’ll not only be thinning PR(Page-Rank) on your site, but in addition to that you’ll suffer the risk of having your content marked as duplicate. Once Google sees all the multiple versions of your domain name their spiders examines which page to rank, and all the rest directs into the supplemental index.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Google | 2 Comments

What is RSS?

May 18, 2008

I will explain RSS very quickly. If you don’t know what is RSS and what is RSS Reader, it can sound and look like bogy. Actually its not so hard and I will keep it simple. You can also watch a video with explanation.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under RSS | Leave a Comment

Speed up Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer With Google Web Accelerator

May 10, 2008

Google Web accelerator will speed up your Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. It will not work for other browsers.

Google

When you say Google, you first think on google search engine. Logical. But there is so much behind this simple white web page with just one search bar. As you probably know you can explore google maps, google videos, google images, use Google Talk and Google mail, but please don’t stop here with google. You can go much further.

In a minute, I’ll tell you how you can speed up your Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer using simple Google program.

Mozilla

Google is only a half of the story here. If you are not using Mozilla Firefox, than consider switching to. Mozilla is proven and reliable. Here is just one feature I much like at Mozilla, which is not available at Internet Explorer. If you close accidentally your browser, you will be able to restore your session. At Internet Explorer you can not do that. Period. And there is more cool Mozilla features, but let’s focus on the topic.

Here is where you can get the Google Web Accelerator program. Just watch the video. And pay attention on video topic, because you will not be able to play youtube, rever or google videos if you don’t disable in that particular moment.

Get this: Google Web accelerator

Bottom line is that you should not expect miracle, but it will make the difference and make your Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer faster.

It is not working at Firefox 3.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Tools | 2 Comments

web 2.0 accumulative searching tool

April 23, 2008

Sputtr is really helpful tool to use when you have searching in your mind. If you are trying to find contact on Facebook, blog on Technorati, video on Youtube or Google images, this accumulated web 2.0 tool enable perfect selection of your search aim (see point on the picture). Sputtr gives opportunity to search through application you need with just one click.

Just bookmark this page and when you have to search the web, whichever direction your search is, it will promptly and easily provide you with your demand.

The best part is that sputtr enables complete customization. You can add Twitter or MySpace application, and exclude amazon, ebay or wikipadia for example, and fit everything to personal needs.

But when we talk about customization it can cause some problems if you do not pay attention. Namely, this is not membership site and your customization is based on browsing cookies. So if you delete your cookies your screen customization will be reset to default, loosing all changes.

A lot of applications and different logos can cause difficulties to ordinary people and people outside of the tech industry. And to read more about these difficulties follow article from readwriteweb. You will also find more info about Alternative Search Engines Day.

Every tool which enables easier and faster internet surfing is very welcome from my point of view, and Sputtr will have the place in my web 2.0 tool library.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under web 2.0 tools | 2 Comments

Implicating Adsense in the post

April 14, 2008

I found a great video on tubetorial site explaining how to implicate Adsense in the posts, using Adsense Deluxe plugin.

Its a great plugin which enable displaying Google or Yahoo Adsense integrated in text post, instead of sidebar or header.

If your focus is on Adsense advertising this is the excellent way to display ads directly to the posts.

So here is the link to watch short video on tubetorial.

And if you want to find more great plugins, you can read my post more-than-10-great-wordpress-plugins.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under plugins | Leave a Comment

Online Games

April 10, 2008

This page I have devoted to online fun, and that is online games. Playing online skill games for 15 to 30 minutes daily is really relaxing. I enjoy playing uVme games, and my favorites are Sudoku, Fruit Frenzy and Basketball. Here you can read briefly description of these games.

The uVme games platform offers a selection of the very best online gaming titles which can be played in one on one challenge or tournaments for cash prizes. These are simple online games of skill, highly enjoyable and rivalry. These games have something for everyone, researches are saying that casual skill games are played equally by men and women.

You can start playing these online games for free, and here are examples:

Board games like draughts, and backgammon
Sports games like pool, darts, golf and basketball
Puzzle games like word games and jigsaws
Arcade games such as shooting games

CLICK HERE TO PLAY GAMES!

You are able to play free arcade games online, a free online multi player games,

but at uVme you will find real challenge playing tournament games for real cash prizes, and at the same time chat with your friends with new uVme Instant Messenger (which is merging contacts from Yahoo, Google Tak, MSN, AOL in one place).