Install WordPress Blog Search Engines Optimized

July 11, 2008

There are a number of reasons why someone can decide to start a blog. On the first glance setup can look confusing, but truth is far from it. On the other hand you don’t want to stop just with WordPress installation, because making just few neat tweaks can bring SEO friendly weblog. Best of all, you will have video help. This is basic set of WordPress video tutorials.

Installing right plugins for WordPress helps search engine optimization for the blog. It makes the difference in front of other publishing softwares, putting you ahead of other bloggers. Step by step video tutorials will lead you through proper search engine friendly WordPress installation, but first let’s check what you need before starting the setup:

Web host – You need domain name and hosting for your WordPress weblog. If you haven’t already gotten your own hosting account setup, I recommend that you start off using Hostgator. They are one of the best services in the market with quality customer support (phone, forum, chat, email support). I don’t want to spoil them, but you should know:

· for affordable price Hostgator is offering high bandwidth

· WordPress installation with Fantastico which makes set up even more leisurely

· there are no hidden charges
Ftp program - for uploading files from computer to the hosting server. You can download and use FileZilla, which is completely free. There are a lot of ftp software programs, but for most of them, you need to buy the software. Actually I only know for FileZilla as a free. Using those programs is extremely easy…just watch this short video clip which is explaining basics for FileZilla usage.

FileZilla Instructions
Now you’re ready to download WordPress and to start with installation.

Video tutorials for WordPress

These videos will guide you and help you to install plugins that will give you higher search engine rankings, you will find which plugin to use for indexing optimization, which is the correct permalinks structure to use… and more tips. So lets begin: Installing WordPress blog and SEO Optimization with video tutorials | WordPress Blog

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Uncategorized | 6 Comments

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!

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

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

More than 10 Great WordPress Plugins

April 9, 2008

The following article is showing the list of WordPress plugins that will help you have a better experience with your blog. Most of these are must have plugins for WordPress.
Besides Akismet, which is automatically installed on WordPress, here are the plugins I found useful:

All-in-one-seo-pack - Plugin for Search Engine Optimization

Google xml Sitemaps -The Google Sitemap Plugin automagically pings Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search at regular intervals, notifying them of new content and/or changes to your site.

Optimal Title – optimize your post titles for search engines

Smart ping - Protects you from over pinging. When you edit your post, it prevent pinging so you are proteced from being considered as spammer

Another Wordpress meta plugin - This plugin allows you to specify META information, that is keywords and descriptions, for your posts and pages. Additional META keywords are derived from your categories.)

“What Would Seth Godin Do?” - This plugin will definitely help you get more RSS subscribers! It’s called “What Would Seth Godin Do“

WP-Contact Form – Great contact form plugin with security question. Here is an example on my contact page.

Darren’s Related Posts plugin or Wasabi Related Entries – As your blog grows you will certainly like to have one of these plugins which will help you to detain your readers on the blog, by showing related posts at the end of your post.

ADD This- for social bookmarking
Favicon manager - manage favicon image.

For tagging:

UltimteTagWarrior – for tagging

Tag sugest Thing - Tag Suggest Thing uses the Yahoo! term extraction API to find tags to suggest.

Embedded Tag Thing - To display a word in a post as a tag, wrap it in markup (with square brackets!)

For ads:

Adsense-Deluxe - Place Google AdSense ads inside your WordPress Posts

Ad Rotator – Rotate adsense, and any other kind of ad, graphic, etc. wherever you place the code

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad - displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog

For translation:

Global Translator - translates a blog in fourteen different languages. Hmm, its not so accurate translation, but you may want to have this for your blog.

It never hurts to be well informed with the latest on WordPress plugins and you can always explore more in this area, because you want to plug in your blog to higher level!