Last night we were an hour into the WordPress SEO call and because we were so into giving all the listeners great content that we missed the count down on Instant Teleseminar to extend the call. See we scheduled the call for an hour but we were covering so much to help you with your WordPress SEO that we went over time.

That would not be a problem if we had been paying attention to the timer but we were not.

Unfortunately that cut everyone listening on the web off at once.

The good part was that those on the phone were still there and our second recorder was still going. I put the last 15 minutes or so of the call up and you can catch that if you missed it at our apology page.

Now the discount for getting the workbook, note sheet, recording and transcripts was going to end right after the call but because of the mishap it will be available until midnight tonight.

So go grab the last 15 minutes and then if you find the information worthwhile (and you will )go check out the special pricing before it increases.

Get the WordPress SEO Call.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: Instant Teleseminar, wordpress, WordPress SEO Call

Tomorrow at 7 pm Steve Roye and I will be holding our free WordPress SEO Call. You need to register to attend.

WordPress SEO Call

You can grab the note sheet if you want to see all that we will be covering.

Note sheet

In addition to the note sheet all attendees will receive a pdf with all of the links mentioned, how to’s with screen captures so you can apply these items right away.

Best of all we will continue until we have answered all of your questions.

You must be registered to get the call details so go sign up right now.

WordPress SEO Call

Hope to see you there.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: seo, wordpress, wordpress seo, WordPress SEO Call

Generating links is one of the keys to improving your search engine rankings. Various Web 2.0 properties can be an excellent way to do this and there are a couple advantages to using them.

• They tend to be high PR pages
• You get to set the exact anchor text

Here are 3 that I like to use.

• Squidoo
• Hub Pages
• Google Knol

All of these are free sites that you can use and they allow you to add in the RSS feed from your blog. You need to add in direct links to your pages using anchor text for what the page is about.

You can use each of these to target one of your long tail keywords per page.

These are just a few of the linking strategies that will be covered in the WordPress SEO Call on Wednesday at 7 pm.

Sign up for the WordPress SEO Call here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: anchor-text, Google Knol, Hub Page, squidoo, wordpress seo

Plugins are one of the great things about using WordPress. Being able to easily change the way your blog works with out having to dig into the code is one of the great advantages.

These can be used to improve the way your blog works.

Today I want to talk about two that can help your blog be more search engine friendly for the terms you are targeting. The first is a plugin to edit your title tags called All In One SEO.

Now before I get into what this does and why you should use it lets discuss one of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in WordPress. There are thousands of plugins written by hundreds of different programmers and for most things there are multiple plugins that will work.

Unfortunately because there are so many plugin authors not all of them will play nice together. Although there are more than a few plugins that will do what All In One SEO does or at least something similar I recommend this one and all of the other plugins I use because they have been tested together with the current version of WordPress.

One of the downsides is that the package of plugins will change over time due to changes in the WordPress script, plugin authors not continuing to develop them, etc. So if you are coming to this post a few months from now check my blog here for any updates because the package of compatible plugins is always subject to change.

All In One SEO will allow you to change your title tags on your blog for each post so you can target the keywords you want to rank for with good titles. This will definitely allow you to rank higher for those terms over using generic title tags of WordPress.

The second must have plugin is Simple Tags. One of the biggest things I use this plugin for is to add related posts to each post. This is important because your visitors from the search engines are not coming to your home page but to your individual posts.

Having related posts on the same subject allows visitors to find items that may be similar and may actually be the answer they seek easily.

These are just two of five must have plugins that will be covered in much more detail on the free call on WordPress SEO this coming Wednesday along with a lot more information on many topics related to making your blog rank high in the search engines for the keywords you are targeting. Sign up and plan to attend.

Free WordPress SEO Call

Hope to see you there.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: All-in-one-seo, plugins, serp raniking, simple tags, wordpress seo

Everybody’s idea of the perfect WordPress theme is slightly different and if you are trying to do this with a free theme it seems there are always tradeoffs to take into account.

3 of the easier fixes can be done from the styles.css file on most themes.

• Fonts
• Backgrounds
• Header

So if you find the almost perfect WordPress theme and you want to make it your own here are some simple fixes for you. (Caution: Always, always, always make a backup of your files before editing them. ALWAYS. Got that? Yes always )

Now that the disclaimer is done lets look at how I can change the font for my theme. I will use the main content area in this example but you can do it for the sidebar or even the header in the same manner.

You can change the font size by finding the place where it is set.

In this case it is 12 px which is fine but if it were 8 or 10 px they can be hard to read and you might want to change it. Anytime you do change the font size you will want to see what the line spacing size is. If I had changed that from 12 px to 16px I would probably want to change the line space accordingly or the text will take up all of the space.

As on this theme it is only 18 px and the lines would have very little white space which would still leave the blog hard to read.

Changing backgrounds is easy too especially if it is a solid color. You will need the hexadecimal color code for the new color.

If it is solid you only need to change the code and the background color will change. If it is an image you will need to upload the new image and you can either overwrite the image with the same name with your new image (not recommended and grab a copy of the original first in a safe place) or upload the new image with a different name and edit the css file.

Changing the header is the same as changing a background image. Add the new image in the same manner and edit the css file.

Now you know how to tweak the css to take your almost perfect theme and bring it closer to perfection. (There is no perfect blog theme though we all keep striving for it and if you find one you will change your mind and grow bored with it eventually.)

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: change blog background, change blog header, edit css, edit font size

Well I got side tracked (must come from being old and bald) from expanding on the topics that Nicole Dean brought up while guest blogging at Mike Paetzold Recommends last month. Then again it may be I got side tracked with the Keyword Call and getting the preparation done for the WordPress SEO Call next Wednesday. (Make sure you get signed up – hint, hint).

One of the ways to find topics for content is using your stats and Nicole gave some good ones but missed my favorite – MyBlogLog.

What I like about MyBlogLog is they will give me the search phrase and the search engine for my visitors. You can often mine this information and by paying attention to exactly how they found you.

There is a section of my traffic for today on this blog. Most of these topics show up quite regularly. A few of the topics that show quite regularly from this list are

• How to add Aweber form to your blog
• Anything about Google trends, insights and WonderWheel (Not on the list today but shows quite frequently)
• Anything about linking your blog to your website or making your blog look like your website

Going through the full list each day will give you a lot of different ideas and it is especially important when you see Google showing keyword searches that you have not targeted.

If you see traffic coming to a page that mentions a keyword phrase that is a very small part of the whole post and it happens more than once then those are a perfect topic to target as there must be no real competition for that term and Google is hard pressed to find a more relevant page.

Those topics can be golden and though most don’t get huge volumes of traffic you are likely to get the lions share of what is there and it will come consistently.

Make sure you have signed up for the free WordPress SEO Call next Wednesday at 7 pm.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog stats, find content, mybloglog, Nicole Dean

One of the big things people need to understand is the little things done regularly that make a huge difference in your blogging efforts. None of the individual items tends to make a huge difference but combined they make a huge difference.

You can create back links in many ways. Three of the most common are to write articles, comment on other blogs and bookmark regularly.

Article writing takes a bit of effort but the other two are quite easy to make a regular part of your daily routine. After all if you are active in a niche that your blog resides you will be interacting through comments regularly as a natural part of your day.

Social bookmarking is just a habit that needs to be fostered. Do make sure that you are bookmarking more than just your posts. Again if you are active in your niche this is easy because you will find quality information from others regularly.

That leaves writing articles which can be extremely powerful but is not easy to make part of your regular routine. It does not have to be because if you have done a two part blog post it is fairly simple to use that as a basis for an article. You just need to be aware and use the content you are already creating by repurposing it. Adding an article submission each week should take you less than 30 minutes but at the end of the year you now have 50 articles out and around the net drawing visitors and creating links to your blog.

Want to take it up a level and you can use a service like Article Marketer where you can submit the article and they will distribute it for you to hundreds of directories.

Now an article, a comment or a bookmark won’t make a huge difference in your blog traffic but adding all of those regularly will make a huge difference in the traffic your blog gets.

To attend the free call on the 23rd at 7 pm on WordPress SEO sign up at WordPress SEO Call. Hope to see you there.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: article-submission, backlinks, blog commenting, social bookmarking, wordpress

One of the biggest questions that comes up here is how to generate more traffic to someone’s blog? To help people with that Steve and I will be doing a call on SEO For Your WordPress Blog. Proper set up and SEO are one of the best ways to increase your traffic.

We will answer these questions -

• What plugins are absolutely necessary?
• What settings make a difference?
• What types of posts will help me the most?
• How often should I post?
• What are tags and how do they help?
• What linking strategies work the best?
• Why is MyBlogLog a must use site?
• How can RSS feeds help my SEO?
• And even more because you will be able to ask any question you have on this topic too?

You can get access to this call for free on September 23rd at 7 pm.

Sign up here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog seo, seo, wordpress seo

My friend Alex Syseof and his partner have just updated there Expert WordPress. Now when they first launched it a year or so ago I loved the ease and now they have made it even better.

The new automated install feature is great with a few caveats. It only works with a limited number of hosts. Host Gator is one of them and they are a quality host for blogs and quite reasonable too.

To do it you fill out a form and click install and your blog is up and installed and 90% of your settings are completed. There are a few odds and ends to clean up but I installed a new blog, tweaked the few items and has a blog up and complete in less than 10 minutes.

Check out Expert WordPress

You can see the blog I created here on Colon Cleansing.The only things I needed to tweak after installing it was to add my Adsense information, my code for Askimet and my widget code for Share This. Then I edited the widget set up and I was totally done.

In doing this I went through all of the settings and Alex and Dmitry have set up this blog to be extremely SEO friendly and I was really surprised that there were very few tweaks that were different.

Over all they have done an excellent job and made it extremely easy for any niche blogger to install blogs quickly that are properly set up.

On a scale of 1-10 the setup is a 9 out of 10 for quality and the use is a 7 out of 10 only because of the limited number of hosts supported.

Technorati Tags: install WordPress, wordpress, wordpress seo

WordPress just made a post on their blog titled How to Keep WordPress Secure

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

I always recommend you be using the latest version and this thing seems to be a nasty little bug. Have heard from a couple friends that they have had this and it is a bear to fox.

Make sure that you have your blogs updated to the latest version.

Technorati Tags: security bug WordPress, wordpress, WordPress security, wordpress-upgrade