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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 6

ashish — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:21:02 +0000

In the previous post (structure of a post for search engine optimization) I talked about how to structure a post in terms of title, H1, H3 tags, inserting keyword phrases, and so on without doing it in excess.
This post will talk about things such as defining permalinks (relevant for all blogs, although my experience is more with WordPress blogs), adding breadcrumbs, making your blogs faster, cleaning up the code).
- First of all, permalinks. Your WordPress default installation comes up with setting permalinks in the form of a parameter, and nothing descriptive. What you need to do is to go to your Settings inside the Admin -> Permalinks and change the settings from the default to something like ‘Month and Name’. Now, whenever you give a descriptive title to your post, that same will also be set for your post. So, for example, the URL for this post is something like ‘http://earn-cash-tips.com/2010/02/search-engine-optimization-tips-and-tricks-–-learn-how-to-increase-visibility-in-search-engines-–-part-6′. This descriptive URL makes the search engines pick up the URL and rank it higher.
- Make sure that you add Breadcrumbs to your site; what are Breadcrumbs ? These are the text near the top of a post that point out the path to the post. So, for example, for this post, the Breadcrumb would be in the nature of: Articles -> Optimization -> Search Engine Optimization. Breadcrumbs give your users an easy way to do site navigation, as well as also allow search engines to easily navigate your site easier. One way to do that is through a plugin such as the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin.
- Search engines read your site like a text browser, and cannot read your fancy JavaScript and CSS, so if you have built navigation systems based entirely on Javascript, then some search engines will have problems being able to read your site. You want search engines to be easily able to index your entire site, so make sure that the navigation to all your pages is easily available.
- In continuation of the above tip, make sure that you do not have too much of CSS and JavaScript code inside your site code, instead move it all to CSS files that are referenced properly from within your code. This provides a clean interface to search engines.
- Use Sitemaps. Sitemaps are easily available if you do a Google search, so make sure that you have setup a sitemap and submit to the different search engines (for example, for Google, submit sitemaps to the Google Webmasters site). Sitemaps allow search engines to get notified when you update your site, as well as provide them a way to get into all the pages of your site.
- Learn more about how to speed up your blog. Use database speeding up techniques to decrease the load required with database interactions, including reducing the number of database interactions. In addition, as the number of your viewers increase, start using plugins such as Wp-Cache and WP-Super-Cache to speed up your blog. Do other tips such as reducing the number of plugins you do not actually use, or which can be pretty heavy (such as the plugin that hunts for relevant posts – very useful, but can be heavy in terms of DB interactions)

As usual, you will read more in the next post in this series.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 5

ashish — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:26:52 +0000

The previous post in the series (Duplicate content and Search Engines) talked about duplicate content, how search engines ignored such content, and could potentially penalize you for the same.
This post talks more about how to structure your content for improving your rankings in Search Engines and involves the use of keywords in H1 and other headings. In a previous post, we talked about Keyword density should form around 4-6% of your post contents (not more, otherwise it will look like keyword stuffing). Identify key phrases that you want to emphasize in your post before making the post, and get a general idea of the location where you should use these keyword phrases. So, for example, if you consider this post, you should use the following keyword phrases ‘Search Engine Optimization’, ‘SEO’, ‘Content’, ‘Search Engine Ranking’, and similar such phrases.
- The title and H1 tags in your post should contain some of these phrases, but always keep in mind that the they should still be readable and be comprehensible to your readers. So, if you have a title such as ‘Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Ranking SEO’, it has a number of keywords, but does not form any sort of correct grammar (and keep in mind, that for titles and headings, you can use phrases instead of sentences), then it can look strange to readers. It is not very hard to have a correct combination of a keyword dense title that makes sense.
- With the above example, as you get down to the H2 and H3 tags, include the main sections of these keywords such as using ‘Search Engine’, or ‘Search Ranking’, so you are not stuffing your keyword phrases in all your headings, but are still using some of these keywords in a way that makes sense to your readers
- In the body of your message, use sections of your keyword phrases such as ‘Search Engine’, ‘Ranking’, etc, utilizing them in the body of the message, but keep in mind that your usage of the phrases should fit in with the body of the message and not break the flow of the post body.
- The way to start in this technique is to first write your post in your regular flow, and then optimize it for Search Engine Optimization. As a part of this, make sure that you use around 60 characters for the title of your post. Now, review your post and then consider breaking up the sections of the post using H2 tags; this helps to guide your readers through the post, and also provides relevant tags for the search engines.
- A typical WordPress installation has multiple links to the same content, and it makes sense to reduce some of the potential duplicate nature of these content that is visible to search engines when they spider your site. Using a plugin such as the All-In-One-SEO can set noindex for some of these locations, reducing the areas where this duplicate content is visible
[Consider this video about how to use the All-In-One-SEO-Pack (link)]

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 4

ashish — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:28 +0000

In the previous post (Content is king for blogging), I had talked about various tips for using content to increase your search engine rankings. In this post, I will talk more about how having duplicate content on your blog (copying content from another blog) can lead to penalties for your blog, and what are the steps you should do to ensure that you don’t suffer from penalties.
- First of all, if you are writing content that is not duplicate, many of your readers who would have wanted to get some quality information (and who would have already read similar information on other sites will quickly skip over and may not come back if they see this happening on a regular basis)
- Search engines also want to ensure that their users do not get the same type of content in their search results, and hence will penalize sites which have content that are duplicate of each other. Search engines have complicated algorithms that are able to distinguish as to which blog was the original content creator, and which blogs have copied the content.
Read more about it at this blog (duplicate content penalty)

If your content was copied from another source, the search engines will not list those pages or give you any credit for that content since it was indexed already from another site. Does this mean it is alright to do and I will not get a penalty? No it is not, consider it a self imposed penalty on your own real estate website as those pages will never be indexed, thus a waste of your time and a waste of page space on your website.

- There are many cases where you want to syndicate your content to other sites. For example, you would certainly want to write an article on other sites that are highly ranked to get some incoming link credit (will explain this technique later), but how do you avoid a duplicate content penalty by having this same article on your site as well. There are 2 ways of doing this – You can either send a shorter version of your content for syndication, or you can create 2 different versions for syndication and for your own blog. This will help you to avoid the duplicate content penalty
- If you do have duplicate content on your site, then it is very much possible that aggrieved content owners who had the original content on their sites come after you. They can issue you cease and desist letters, or can actually file cases against you with your service providers or hosting companies. So, in addition to search engines ignoring this content, you can actually get into hassles with this content.
- However, you are not prohibited from quoting other blogs if you appreciate the blog or want to post a critique of the blog. You would need to post a link to the blog post which you are referring, and can post a small section of the post length while either praising or criticizing the post. You should make sure that you are not copying the central idea of the post, or posting huge chunks of the post.

As usual, you will hear more in the next post about content, SEO and related stuff.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 3

ashish — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:48:13 +0000

Previous posts (Part 2) talk about some of the tips and tricks in starting to learn about Search Engine Optimization, what are the benefits that it brings to your site, as well as some warnings about what not to do. Here are some more tips about what to do to increase the Search Engine rankings of your site:
- Content is king. You need to have good and rich content (when we say rich content, we mean that content that appeals to people, provide them the information that they are looking for, and keeps them coming in again and again). Put yourself in the place of your readers, try to figure out what they may be looking for, and write accordingly. Consider whether you will visit a blog regularly if you find information that is repetitive, difficult to read, or boring.
- Get a regular update of content. Content on your site is indexed through search engine spiders, and if you have a frequency of regular writing (I am now working out a plan to get daily updates), it can make indexing of your site a lot faster. In addition, it turns out that search engines index your sites higher if you have regular content (and there is an ancillary advantage that your readers get more attracted to your site if they get regular content at predicted intervals)
- Keyword optimization. All of us are interested in adding keywords to your content, so that when people search for these keywords, they find your site. As a result, many people overdo it, adding a lot of keywords to their site, and search engines consider these attempts as unfair ways to game the system, and apply penalties. So, if you writing a post on cameras, you should include words such as ‘Digital Camera’, ‘Camera’, ‘Canon’, ‘Nikon’, etc. It is suggested that the amount of keywords in a post should be around 4-6%, and that is good enough to make sure that your readers have something good to read, and yet you get good keyword density.
- It is not enough to have just a few lines of content. You need to have content that is atleast 250 words or more for proper pickup by search engines. The maximum extent of content is dependent on how you believe your readers can read (do not write long essays that bore your readers, or make them leave midway). It is only the most accomplished of content writers who can make readers keep on reading for long 2000-3000 word essays.
- Recognize the problems with non-text content. It is difficult for search engines to index the content of items such as Flash files, video files, or image files, and if you have content that is filled with these and that does not contain much text, it can be difficult for such content to make a high mark in search engine rankings. You need to determine how to ensure that such content can get indexed to the extent possible, such as adding ‘alt’ attributes to the image files.

We will keep on writing more on this area of what all makes search engines rank your blog higher.

Hostmonster users – How to get an update of server status

ashish — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:33:13 +0000

Hostmonster (click here to learn more) is a popular hosting service used by individuals to host their blogs and other sites (although I have not heard of too many professional sites with huge number of users using WordPress as a hosting service). I use WordPress for my sites, and it runs fairly well, with easy installation of blogs, and other similar software. I did not have to learn much to do installation and configuration of my blogs.
However, one pet peeve I have is that the service goes down once in a while, not frequently enough to be an irritant, but I do notice once it is down (and sometimes can take 1-2 hours to come back up). At such times, it is easy enough to go to Hostmonster chat (right on the main page) to talk to somebody from support, and you can get enough detail about when the server will be back up, as well as what the problem is.
However, getting on the phone to talk to support, or to go to the chat system both take time. There is an easier way to quickly find out if there is a known problem on the server, and what the status for that problem is. There is a page called “Hostmonster Server Status Notification’ that has an update for the servers on which you have to host your sites. This page is located at this link.